Avoid wind and welds for successful manufacturing

I've been intermittently tied up with two different challenges over recent months. Both were concerned with industrial quality issues but, despite that superficial semblance of a link, they couldn't have been more different. One was in a large plant, part of a regional economic development plan with government start-up funding; the other concerned a small village co-operative. One could offer me live access to its own data stores. The other had no process records or quality assurance expertise of any kind, until I started to design some; no telecommunications either, and the staff would have to do most of the work themselves under my intermittent direction. Both were concerned with manufacture of containers: milled steel in one case; fired clay in the other. Losses in the first, though so eye-wateringly large that my contingency fee was a pinprick, were being covered by deficit funding in the interest of public relations; those in the other were tiny, but would quickly cripple the co-operative, if not stemmed.

The two cases called for different approaches to a similar question: what production factors led to delayed fracture faults in a significant minority of the finished units?

I had encountered a detective-style case similar in some ways to the milled steel problem a couple of years ago, putting a review copy of Statistica Data miner release 6 to good use. I learnt a lot on that job, and applied the knowledge to the current concerns. It also happened, by a happy coincidence, that Statistica release 7 had just come to hand as this current pair of challenges hove into sight - so I earmarked it immediately for the larger-scale plant. The small village enterprise, though, called for a very different approach: something that could be applied by inexperienced and untrained users, so that every stage didn't have to wait on communications back to me. I had a copy of SigmaStat 3.0 lying around, which had impressed me by the ease with which it was accessed by novice users during a trial run in another industrial context; Systat International advised that a new 3.1 update was available, and sent a copy of for use in the co-op. [more...]