Accredited Registrars
Accredited Registrars are qualified organizations certified by a national body to perform audits to the QS9000 standard and to register the audited facility as meeting these requirements for a given commodity.

Acceptable Quality Level(AQL)
AQL is limit of a satisfactory process average at a particular quality level when a continuing series of lots is considered.

Acceptance Sampling
Inspection of a sample from a lot to decide whether to accept or not accept that lot. There are two types - attributes sampling and variables sampling.

Accuracy
The closeness of agreement between an observed value and an accepted reference value. Also see Precision.

Activity-based costing(ABC)
A system for making business decisions based on cost information of fundamental business activities as tasks related to product design, development, quality, manufacturing, distribution, customer acquisition, service and support. ABC is sometimes considered a form of business process re-engineering as it insists on surfacing a manageable number of cost drivers that can be used to trace variable business costs to customer, products and processes.

Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP)
Generally speaking APQP is a structured method of defining the steps necessary to ensure that a product satisfies the customer. In the automotive industry, APQP is a systematic product introduction process that aims to facilitate supply chain communication and ensure quality throughout the vehicle development process.

Affinity Diagram
A way to organize facts, opinions, ideas and issues into natural groupings as an aid to diagnosis on a complex problem. A large number of ideas are generated and then organized into groupings to reveal major themes. (more)

Agile Manufacturing
Tools, techniques, and initiatives that enable a plant or company to thrive under conditions of unpredictable change. Agile manufacturing not only enables a plant to achieve rapid response to customer needs, but also includes the ability to quickly reconfigure operations and strategic alliances to respond rapidly to unforeseen shifts in the marketplace. More from Case Western Reserve U.

AIAG
Automotive Industry Action Group

Andon
A type of visual control that displays the current state of work (i.e., abnormal conditions, work instructions, job progress info). It is one of the main tools of Jidoka.

Analysis of Means (ANOM)
Developed by Ellis R. Ott in 1967 (later enhanced by Edward Schilling), ANOM is a statistical procedure for troubleshooting industrial processes and analyzing the results of experimental designs with factors at fixed levels. It provides a graphical display of data. Ellis R. Ott developed the procedure in 1967 because he observed that non-statisticians had difficulty understanding analysis of variance. 

Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)
a basic statistical technique for analyzing experimental data. It subdivides the total variation of a data set into meaningful component parts associated with specific sources of variation in order to test a hypothesis on the parameters of the model or to estimate variance components. ANOVA is used to test whether the means of many samples differ but it does so using variation instead of mean. It compares the amount of variation within the samples to the amount of variation between the means of samples. If the 'between variation' is significantly larger than the 'within variation', we conclude that the mean of our response has changed. An excellent tool to help visualize an ANOVA analysis is a multiple box plot - showing the mean (dot) and the within group variation (box). ANOVA provides an effective technique to separate inherent variance and special cause variance (i.e., group effect variation). ANOVA also provides a methodology to evaluate the robustness of a process to various levels of a particular factor (or treatment). Click here for more.