Process and Product Improvement in Manufacturing Systems with Correlated Stages

Paul F. Zantek · Gordon P. Wright · ROBERT D. PLANTE

87 citations0/0 files storedManagement Science

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Management and Optimization Techniques Quality and Supply Management Management Systems and Quality Improvement

Abstract

Manufacturing systems typically contain processing and assembly stages whose output quality is significantly affected by the output quality of preceding stages in the system. This study offers and empirically validates a procedure for (1) measuring the effect of each stage's performance on the output quality of subsequent stages including the quality of the signal product, and (2) identifying stages in a manufacturing system where management should concentrate investments in process quality improvement. Our proposed procedure builds on the precedence ordering of the stages in the system and uses the information provided by correlations between the product quality measurements across stages. The starting point of our procedure is a computer executable network representation of the statistical relationships between the product quality measurements; execution automatically converts the network to a simultaneous-equations model and estimates the model parameters by the method of least squares. The parameter estimates are used to measure and rank the impact of each stage's performance on variability in intermediate stage and final product quality. We extend our work by presenting an economic model, which uses these results, to guide management in deciding on the amount of investment in process quality improvement for each stage. We report some of the findings from an extensive empirical validation of our procedure using circuit board production line data from a major electronics manufacturer. The empirical evidence presented here highlights the importance of accounting for quality linkages across stages in (a) identifying the sources of variation in product quality and (b) allocating investments in process quality improvement.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 87 citations exist upstream.

References

1980Simultaneous Optimization of Several Response Variables 1984Treating Progress Functions as a Managerial Opportunity 1993Regression Adjustment for Variables in Multivariate Quality Control 2000Behind the Learning Curve: Linking Learning Activities to Waste Reduction 1964Allocation of Screening Inspection Effort—A Dynamic-Programming Approach 2001An Empirical Examination of Dynamic Quality-Based Learning Models 1982The Impact of Inspector Fallibility on the Inspection Policy in Serial Production Systems 1986A Survey of Models for Allocating Inspection Effort in Multistage Production Systems

Cited by

2009Minding the Gaps: Understanding Technology Interdependence and Coordination in Knowledge Work 2008The dynamics of quality costs in continuous improvement 2015Markov modeling and analysis of multi-stage manufacturing systems with remote quality information feedback 2015A multistage and multiple response optimization approach for serial manufacturing system 2010Chart allocation strategy for serial-parallel multistage manufacturing processes

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.