Selection of Quality-Inspection Procedures for Short-Run Productions

Designing quality-inspection procedures may be difficult for short-run manufacturing processes, due to poor effectiveness of the classical statistical-process-control (SPC) techniques for these processes. This paper proposes a practical methodology to guide quality designers in selecting the more effective and economically convenient inspection procedures. First, the process of interest is decomposed into a number of steps, in which specific defects can occur. Next, several parameters related to inspection effectiveness and cost are combined into a probabilistic model. The more effective and economically convenient inspection procedures can finally be determined using two specific synthetic indicators. A case study concerning a short-run production of hardness testing machines is presented and discussed.