Special section editorial

Abstract

For all companies worldwide, the quest for high quality products (and services) has clearly become a key point for business competitiveness. Among the numerous approaches used for improving the quality, the Statistical Process Control (SPC) plays a particularly important role. All around the world, there are many researchers who are developing new SPC methods, trying to implement them into real industrial situations and publishing the results into high level, peer-refereed, international journals. But, surprisingly, for these researchers, there are no recurrent meetings dedicated on this topic only. Based on this finding, it has been decided to fill this gap and to launch in 2009 the first International Symposium on Statistical Process Control (ISSPC'2009, http://isspc2009.free.fr/), July 16-17 2009, Nantes, France. The main objective of this symposium was to bring together a reduced number of selected researchers in SPC, let them present and share their current works. The second related objective was to strengthen existing collaborations and to foster new ones. At the end of ISSPC'2009, it has been decided to