Applied multivariate statistical analysis
Applied multivariate statistical analysis
Economic models for vendor evaluation with quality cost analysis
Management Science
Inspection for circuit board assembly
Management Science
An Empirical Examination of Dynamic Quality-Based Learning Models
Management Science
Behind the Learning Curve: Linking Learning Activities to Waste Reduction
Management Science
Computers and Industrial Engineering
A general model for continuous quality improvement by immune system inspired data driven evolution
CCDC'09 Proceedings of the 21st annual international conference on Chinese control and decision conference
Economic design of time-between-events control chart system
Computers and Industrial Engineering
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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 acomputer 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.