Acceptable Quality Level - AQL

We make widgets. One in every thousand widgets breaks. Is this an acceptable quality level? That's the question AQL tries to answer in taking a well thought-out, statistically random sample of units produced on the widget production line.

In most industries, one break in a thousand units produced is, in fact, acceptable, and the beat goes on. However, this number would probably not be so good if you were Southwest Airlines, because a crash roughly every three days would not be good for business. The pioneer in AQL was General Electric in its heyday...before it was demoted to only being Colonel Electric. The guiding AQL of the behemoth corporation was the advent of Six Sigma quality control.