A Destructive Sampling Method Designed for Outsourcing Situations Involving High Quality Production Processes

In outsourcing situations involving manufacturing and assembly, the sampling of units produced is important since in many situations not all of the units can be tested. Destructive sampling, which commonly occurs in the assembly and manufacturing industry, is a form of sampling where all units produced cannot be tested since the parts are destructively tested. In this situation, sampling techniques are used to determine if an entire lot should be accepted or rejected based on the sampling results. The traditional sampling techniques include single or classical sampling, double sampling, multiple sampling, skip-lot sampling, chain sampling and MIL-STD-105E. The purpose of this paper is to develop a sophisticated technique that monitors quality at a lower cost than traditional methods yet has similar monitoring characteristics in situations where quality is high and tests are destructive. The proposed technique, Destructive Sampling Method for High Quality production processes (DSM-HQ), is based on a cost function, which balances the costs of sampling versus the costs of finding a defect on the field. DSM-HQ assumes to have a Poisson process defect pattern and uses an Empirical Bayesian analysis to allow the researcher to include prior knowledge.