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An experimental diagnostic procedure to identify the source of defects in multi-stage and multi-component production processes

Journal Contribution - Journal Article

Many production processes consist of successive steps in which things can go wrong without notice because the problem is only detectable in the final product. For instance in steel manufacturing, the coils undergo melting, hot rolling, annealing and pickling, and defects in one of these stages only become visible after the final process. In other roduction processes an output issue may only be detected during final testing after the different parts have been assembled. In all these cases it is hard to determine which part of the production process is responsible for an unusually high defect rate. We describe a simple procedure based on cluster detection to identify the problematic step if the following conditions are satisfied: the production of defects tends to occur clustered in time and it is feasible to (partially) reorder the part or batch processing sequence in each stage of the production process. Even if re-ordering is not required for the production, the diagnostic information that can be obtained can well outweigh the potential extra costs involved.
Journal: Journal of Quality Technology
ISSN: 0022-4065
Issue: 3
Volume: 48
Pages: 213 - 226
Publication year:2016
BOF-keylabel:yes
IOF-keylabel:yes
BOF-publication weight:2
CSS-citation score:1
Authors:International
Authors from:Higher Education
Accessibility:Closed