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Boeing Company has been the world's leading producer of large commercial airplanes for several decades. However, in the late 1990s, Europe‐based Airbus Industrie competed with Boeing aggressively and captured almost fifty percent of the over‐100‐seat airplane market. This paper examines the battle between Boeing and Airbus, including a concise report on Airbus' launch of its A380 superjumbo project. The paper also contains the authors' recommendations to Boeing and the U.S. government.

Sam Walton opened his first Wal‐Mart discount store in 1962. Today, Wal‐Mart is not only the world’s largest corporation but also the world’s most admired company, according to a 2003 Fortune magazine poll. Wal‐Mart is competitive and successful because it has been doing many things right. This article helps shed light on the rise of Wal‐Mart and the roots of its competitiveness. Business practitioners aspiring to succeed can learn a great deal from studying the Wal‐Mart way of doing business.

This paper aims to offer a succinct description of the Vioxx recall in 2004 and discuss the fundamental reasons why Merck got into this trouble.

A review of literature has been conducted to provide key facts about the Vioxx disaster and to shed light on the operations of its maker Merck. The Vioxx recall case is analyzed from a perspective including both company profits and public interest.

Merck aggressively marketed an unsafe drug, under the brand name Vioxx, without properly disclosing its serious side effects to consumers. After the facts were revealed, the company faced costly lawsuits, angry investors and falling profits. This case clearly shows how a disaster can occur when a company becomes greedy and seeks undeserved profits at the expense of ethics and social responsibility.

Building a successful and competitive business requires managers to make decisions that balance profit and social responsibility. When business managers run their business solely for profit, problems will almost certainly occur. Such problems can cause severe damage not only to the company's customers but also to the company itself.

Vioxx is one of the biggest marketing mistakes in recent business history. This paper provides valuable learning insights and should be useful to corporate executives, government regulators and business scholars.

When the process probability distribution is non‐normal or is unknown, the process mean and standard deviation may not properly describe the distribution’s shape. Consequently, the traditional process capability indices (PCI) C_p, C_pk, C_pm and C_pmk cannot express the actual process capability. This paper presents a procedure to construct lower confidence limits for PCIs when the process distribution is unknown. First, the order statistics are utilized to find the estimators of C_p, C_pk, C_pm and C_pmk. Bootstrap simulation method is then utilized to construct the lower confidence limits of PCIs, thereby allowing the process’s capability to be evaluated. A numerical example demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed procedure.

Reliability engineers must not only consider the consumption of energy, capital and material resources, but also seek more economic means of completing experiments effectively. This study derives formulae for computing ratios of expected type‐II censoring times and expected complete sampling times when the lifetime adheres to two‐parameter Pareto and Rayleigh distributions. Utilizing such formulae allows the construction of tables providing information about how much experiment time can be saved by employing a type‐II censoring plan instead of a complete sampling plan. Engineers can employ the proposed tables to determine the censoring number, the initial sample size and the other relevant parameters for reducing the total experiment time. Illustrative examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed procedure.

The electronics industry has heavily prioritized enhancing the quality, lifetime and conforming rate (conforming to specifications) of electronic components. Various methods have been developed for assessing quality performance. In practice, process capability indices (PCIs) are used as a means of measuring process potential and performance. Moreover, most PCIs have been developed or investigated under the assumption that electronic components have a lifetime with a normal distribution. However, PCIs for non‐normal distributions have seldom been discussed. Nevertheless, the lifetime of electronic components generally may possess an exponential, gamma or Weibull distribution and so forth. Under an exponential distribution, some properties of the PCIs and their estimators differ from those in a normal distribution. To utilize the PCIs more reasonably and accurately in assessing the lifetime performance of electronic components, this study constructs a uniformly minimum variance unbiased (UMVU) estimator of their lifetime performance index under an exponential distribution. The UMVU estimator of the lifetime performance index is then utilized to develop the hypothesis testing procedure. The purchasers can then employ the testing procedure to determine whether the lifetime of the electronic components adheres to the required level. Manufacturers can also utilize this procedure to enhance process capability.

The Taguchi method is the conventional approach used in off‐line quality control. However, most previous Taguchi method applications have dealt only with a single‐response problem. The multi‐response problem has received only limited attention. Proposes an effective procedure on the basis of the quality loss of each response so as to achieve the optimization on multi‐response problems in the Taguchi method. The procedure is a universal approach which can simultaneously deal with continuous and discrete data. Evaluates a plasma‐enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) process experiment and a case study, indicating that the proposed procedure yields a satisfactory result.

Considers that, occasionally, only part of an experiment can be completed owing to some uncontrollable causes such as the damage to the instrument, power failure during the experiment, and time and cost limitations. States that such incomplete data are generally referred to as censored data. Shows that conventional approaches for analysis of censored data are computationally complicated and often difficult to explain to practitioners. In this work, an effective procedure based on the rank transformation of the responses and the regression analysis is proposed for analysing an experiment with singly censored data. Proposes the procedure is simpler than conventional methods such as maximum likelihood estimation and Taguchi’s minute accumulating analysis. Verifies the proposed procedure by a numerical example.

To propose an accurate product reliability prediction model in order to enhance product quality and reduce product costs.

This study proposes a method for analysing and forecasting field failure data for repairable systems. The novel method constructs a predictive model by combining the seasonal autoregressive integrated‐moving average (SARIMA) method and neural network model.

Current methods for analysing and forecasting field failure data for repairable systems do not consider the seasonal effect in the data. The proposed method can not only analyse the trends and seasonal vibration of the data, but can also forecast the short‐ and long‐term reliability of the system based on only a small amount of historical data.

This study adopts only real failure data from an electronic system to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. Future research may use other product's failure data to verify the proposed method.

Results in this study can provide a valuable reference for engineers when constructing quality feedback systems for assessing current quality conditions, providing logistical support, correcting product design, facilitating optimal component‐replacement and maintenance strategies, and ensuring that products meet quality requirements.

The proposed method is superior to other prediction techniques in predicting future real failure data.

During the complicated production process in integrated circuit (IC) fabrication, various types of defects on a wafer surface are unavoidable. As the wafer size increases, the clustering phenomenon of the defects becomes increasingly apparent. To upgrade IC products’ yield and reliability, statistical process control is feasible for tracking a manufacturing process. However, the clustered defects frequently cause many false alarms when the standard control charts for defects are used. In this study, we present a method for constructing defect control charts in processes that yield clustered defects. A case study is also evaluated, indicating that the proposed method produces satisfactory control charts for the defect data in IC fabrication.