It is my great pleasure and honor to serve as the new Editor-In-Chief of Quality Engineering. I would like to thank the Quality Engineering editor search committee and the ASQ publications management board for their confidence in my vision and leadership for the journal. I would also like to congratulate Prof. Murat Caner Testik for his successful leadership over the past 3 years, and thank him and members of his ERB for their outstanding service to the journal.
For more than 30 years, Quality Engineering has been a major venue for quality practitioners and researchers who seek to share and discover innovative, rigorous, and novel quality engineering concepts and tools. Quality Engineering has consistently strived to maintain a symbiotic link between industry and statistical research by publishing manuscripts with ideas and solutions motivated by real problems in industry, and that emphasize the practical applicability of any new methods developed.
As a new Editor-In-Chief, I envision a bright future for Quality Engineering. In my quest to promote a rich exchange of ideas amongst the quality engineering community, I am reminded of the recent discussion by Steinberg (Citation2016). In his paper, Prof. Steinberg discussed the state of the research in industrial statistics, to include major issues that need to be addressed. One of Steinberg’s primary messages was that the industrial statistics research community is missing important opportunities for significant impact in industry. I concur with Prof Steinberg’s assessment, and thus, I would like to encourage submissions to Quality Engineering that discuss new problems facing the quality practitioner, and provide innovative and practical solutions to industrial challenges posed by realistic data. Given that we now live in an age where data is abundant, I would like to encourage submissions that address the “Big Data” challenges met by today’s quality practitioner. I would also like to encourage new submissions that address data quality. As the utilization of big data is often accompanied by the need to address large, unstructured problems, I would like to encourage submissions that promote statistical thinking, including the application of statistical engineering concepts and practices. An important observation over the last 30 years is the fact that a shift in Western economies from manufacturing to service has created a need for more statistical research motivated by data collected from service industry processes. Thus, I would like to encourage submissions that discuss new problems and present novel solutions for the service quality practitioner. Finally, in addition to publishing new and novel statistical methodologies for the modern quality practitioner, Quality Engineering will also seek to publish useful case studies papers that emphasize novel and practical solutions to actual problems faced by real organizations.
In closing, we are living in exciting times! The rapid advent of new technologies employed in industry has created many new and significant challenges for the modern quality engineer practitioner, as well as opportunities for the quality-engineering researcher. My goal as Editor-In-Chief is for Quality Engineering to serve as a leading forum for the exchange of ideas that break fresh ground, and that simultaneously provide novel and innovative practical solutions to the challenges met by the modern quality engineer practitioner.
Department of Information Systems, Statistics and Management Science, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama
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