CQE

CQE is an abbreviation for "Certified Quality Engineer", a certification given by the American Society for Quality. These engineers are professionally educated in quality engineering and quality control.

They are trained in researching and preventing unnecessary costs through lack of quality, lost production costs, lost market share due to poor quality, etc. They possess the knowledge needed to setup quality control circles, assess potential quality risks, and evaluate human factors and natural process variation.

A partial course syllabus is as follows:

*Management Systems
*Project Management
*Quality Information Systems
*Leadership Principles and Techniques
*Training
*Cost of Quality
*Quality Philosphies & Approaches
*History of Quality
*Total Quality Management
*Customer Relations
*Quality Deployment
*Supplier Qualification & Certication Systems
*Quality Systems
*Documentation Systems
*Configuration Management
*Planning, Controlling and Assuring Product and Process Quality
*Design inputs and design review
*Validation and Qualification Methods
*Process Capability
*Interpretation of technical drawings and specifications
*Material Control
*Acceptance Sampling
*Measurement Systems
*Gage repeatability and reproducibility (Gage R & R)
*Measurement System Analysis
*Destructive and nondestructive testing and measuring
*Traceability to standards
*Calibration systems
*Reliability and Risk Management
*Design of systems for reliability
*Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
*Fault Tree Analysis (FTA)
*Management and Planning Tools
*Corrective Action
*Preventive Action
*Overcoming Barriers to Quality Improvement
*Concepts of Probability and Statistics
*Drawing Valid Statistical Conclusions
*Control Charts
*Properties and application of probability distributions
*Statistical Decision Making
*Tests for means, variances, and proportions
*Design of Experiments
*Statistical process control

Techniques

Some techniques that Quality Engineers use in quality engineering/assurance include:
*Statistical process control
*Deming's wheel
*TQM
*Six Sigma

Applications

These techniques are applicable company/system wide and are, by definition, not only developed for manufacturing processes. Examples include:
*Purchasing
*Sales and after sales
*Manufacturing
*Customer service
*Human resource management
*Research and development

Professional institutes

There are professional institutes, most notably the American Society for Quality, that examine the candidates before they are awarded an official certificate. This process helps to establish and maintain a minimum body of knowledge and skill level among certified engineers.

The Certified Quality Engineer exam is administered by the ASQ twice yearly at numerous locations around the country, and to some extent internationally. The exam changes from test to test in minor detail and the body of knowledge is revised and updated by peer review committees set up by the ASQ. The test itself consists of 160 multiple choice questions that must be answered in five hours (the number of questions and the test length may vary due to the exam being changed by the ASQ).

External links

* [http://www.asq.org/certification/quality-engineer/index.html ASQ.org]
* [http://www.cqeweb.com CQE-web]
* [http://www.qualitycouncil.com/cqe.asp Quality Council]