Popular Manufacturing Myths

Book excerpt: Addressing the beliefs and attitudes that can be detrimental to your organization’s competitiveness, Popular Manufacturing Myths: Eliminating Widely Held Beliefs That Reduce Competitiveness offers time-tested insight into the most common myths encountered in manufacturing environments. It classifies these myths into management myths, shop floor myths, and if appropriate, shared management and shop floor myths. Explaining the reasons why these deeply ingrained beliefs exist, the book outlines remedies that can help to quickly dispel them within your organization. It presents case studies that examine these myths and includes numerous real-world examples that outline simple, yet effective, solutions. Some of the myths dispelled in this book include: Increasing line speed always decreases quality and creates more scrap Reducing the cost of raw materials will decrease the cost of manufacturing Increased inspection will boost quality If it is successful in R&D, it will be successful in production Process problems can only be solved by changing one process parameter at a time Covering the basics of data collection tools, techniques, and analysis, the text offers simple methods to structure your data to assist in communicating clear and logical conclusions across the organization. The author keeps the arithmetic and statistics to a minimum, so readers only require a basic understanding of averaging and normal variation. However, for those who wish to understand a little bit more about a particular concept, technique, tool, or procedure, the book includes an addendum chapter with more detailed explanations and sample calculations.