Editorial for Statistical Engineering Special Issue

This special issue of Quality Engineering is dedicated to articles on the topic of statistical engineering (SE) as recently defined in Hoerl and Snee (2010). We, the editors of this volume and the authors, believe that SE has an emerging and substantial role to play in the evolution of our profession. Statisticians have long been developing important tools and methods in a diverse set of areas, but there has been little formal structure guiding how these can be combined to solve more complicated and important problems. Some applied statisticians have taught themselves how to select, sequence, and synthesize tools to benefit their organizations and impact the bottom line, but there has been little formally available to leverage this expertise of disseminating it to the broader community. The logo from the American Society for Quality (ASQ) Statistics Division website (http://asq.org/statistics/quality-information/statistical-engineering) shown above symbolizes the role of SE as an approach to combining statistical tools as a pathway for solving important problems with substantial financial impact for businesses and industry. The tools shown (the fishbone diagram popularized by Six Sigma, design of experiments, statistical models, and process control) are chosen as representative of a rich set of resources available to practitioners to create solutions in a wide variety of applications. The ASQ Statistics Division Website provides links and background materials to other resources related to this topic. The term statistical engineering has a rich past and present—and as with may compound terms, multiple definitions are possible and appropriate. The two main definitions encompass the following: