Question

How could bringing a process into statistical control affect a company's production schedule? What benefits can customers see as a result of doing business with a company whose processes are running in a stable, predictable manner?

Answer 1

If the processes of are company are statistically under control, there is no issue.. The production will run efficiently in its normal expected time or schedule... But if in between, the process becomes out of control, then the manager needs to check out why this happened... what are the root cause and its impacts... How to control it so that the variations in the process are reduced... This might delay the production schedule as the machines need to be rechecked and then again applied for production after the abnormalities are taken care of so that the process remains under the Upper Control Limit and the Lower Control Limit.

Process Stability means the consistency of the process with respect to important characteristics such as the mean value of a key dimension or the variation in that key dimension. If the process behaves consistently over time, then it can be said that the process is stable or in control. The graphic below illustrates a stable process.

Stable Process (In Control) Stable Process (In Control)

Customers can see the following benefits whenever they work with companies whose processes are running in a stable, predictable manner:

1. They can predict the performance of a stable process; and therefore improve its capability.

2. if the process is stable and has consistently certain amount of errors, then the customers can easily find the root cause of the problem and later they can minimise the error in order to make the process capable.