In all production processes, Shanghai-America Direct Import & Export Co. Ltd will monitor the extent to which our customer product specifications are meet. In the most general terms, there are two "issues" of product quality: (1) deviations from target specifications, and (2) excessive variability around target specifications. During the earlier stages of developing the production process, we will utilize an on-line or in-process quality control procedure to monitor an on-going production process.

The approach to on-line quality control is straightforward: We will simply extract samples of a certain size from the ongoing production process. We then produce line charts of the variability in those samples, and consider their closeness to target specifications. If a trend emerges in those lines, or if samples fall outside pre-specified limits, then we declare the process to be out of control and take action to find the cause of the problem.