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Quality is a very important issue in production or service; it makes the product attractive. Satisfied customers bring profit to the manufacturer and enable company growth by providing repeat business and by encouraging other potential customers. Of course, quality is not the only issue in business, but it is a major one.
The quality of products and services has been discussed widely by “quality gurus” and others who have published their theories about “quality” and “quality management” in books and articles. Those theories, which supplied the tools for behavior and improvement, helped further improve the quality of products and services and the growth of companies.
At the same time and afterwards, national and international quality standards, based widely on quality theories and standards related to designations in optical drawings and/or specifications, were established and improved. They became an integral part of the manufacturing and managing of quality issues of optical elements and assemblies in all existing organizations involved in the optics industry.
Writing this guide used all of the experience I gathered while inspecting and testing optical elements over the years, in house and at manufacturer plants (source inspection), handling various failures and nonconformance due to bad production, failures or mistakes in design or in production files, and during necessary corrective actions (handled in house, by suppliers or producers, and even according to customer requests). My collaboration with optics designers as a technical consultant involved training and solving problems in the domain of optics QA, which had a special influence on my knowledge in the field of inspection of optical elements.
Important supporting sources for this book include relevant international standards of optics, professional literature (books and articles), and photographs and figures. The information this book presents is very broad and appears in standards, professional literature, books and articles based on the knowledge and experience of people working in this area. Some of those resources are available for purchase, and some are free to download from the Internet. The online information may be changed or removed, and other web sources will appear. Thus, people working in these areas (designing and inspection) should regularly avail themselves of the aforementioned pertinent information to support their current work and develop their knowledge for the future.
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