The cost of quality framework, Quality Function Deployment and the House of Quality, Failure Mode and Effects Analysis methodology, and the design-for-quality principles that build quality in rather than inspecting it in.
Quality engineering is the discipline of designing quality into a product and its process deliberately, rather than relying on end-of-line inspection to catch what the process already produced wrong. This module builds the economic case for that approach through the cost of quality framework, then works through three of the field's core tools: QFD for translating what a customer actually wants into measurable engineering characteristics, FMEA for systematically finding failure modes before a part is ever built, and design-for-quality principles — tolerance stack-up analysis, mistake-proofing, and Taguchi-style robust design — that turn all of it into concrete design decisions.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why a Risk Priority Number can mask a genuinely dangerous failure mode, and why an FMEA's occurrence rating is really a prediction about process capability — the exact prediction Module 14's control charts and Cp/Cpk indices give you the tools to actually check against real data.