Sustainable performance improvement is simply impossible without a firm handle on the precepts and tools of statistical process control (SPC). It is for this reason that we cover industrial statistics so frequently here at Quality Digest. After all, as the great Scottish physicist and engineer Lord Kelvin once said, “If you cannot measure something, you cannot improve it.”

With this in mind, I welcome the release of Process Capability Analysis: Estimating Quality (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, 2018), the forthcoming book from Neil Polhemus. Although not necessarily written with beginners in mind, Polhemus’ work is nevertheless accessible to rank-and-file QA/QC professionals with an abiding interest in the inner workings of process improvement. I myself have no more than a journalist’s basic understanding of SPC, yet found this book’s central premise—i.e., to address “the problem of estimating the probability of nonconformities in a process from the ground up”—to be valid and valuable.

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