Chapter- 16(Manufacturing Planning)

Manufacturing planning: is the collection of activities through which the factory is put into a state of
readiness to meet quality and other standards. It begins with the examination of the design concept to
identify alternative approaches to manufacture and ends when all is in readiness for the factory
personnel to take over and produce. Production is the execution of the plan i.e., the use of machines,
methods, etc. to make finished products out of purchased materials and components.
In the process industries, the work is usually divided into two parts: Broad planning and detailed
planning.
The main factors influencing the decision on responsibility are: the complexities of the product, the
anatomy of the manufacturing process, the technological literacy of the workforce and the
managerial philosophy of reliance, on systems versus reliance on people.
Design review emphasizes on the evaluation of the product design for the adequacy of field
performance.
Relative importance of product characteristics:
Identification of critical items: Critical items are those features of ta product which require a high
level of attention to assure that all requirements are achieved.
Classification of characteristics: the relative importance of individual features or properties of a product
are determined and indicated on drawings and other documents as “functional”, “nonfunctional” or
several other degrees of importance.
Cost of tolerances: varies widely with the precision demanded.
Initial planning for quality: starts with understanding the overall manufacturing process, and
correlating process variables with product results. This can be done using Process diagrams: quality map,
cause and effect diagrams or flow diagrams. A critical aspect of planning manufacture is to discover,
by data collection and analysis, the relationships between process variables or parameters and
product results. A common obstacle to utilize the inherent capability of a process is that, for reasons of
productivity, products from several processes are commingled.
Two sources of variation are: stream to stream variation and within stream variation.
Process capability = 6
Where = the standard deviation of the process under a state of statistical control, i.e., under no drift
and no sudden changes.
A major reason for quantifying process capability is to be able to compute the ability of the process
to hold product tolerances. For processes which are in state of statistical control, a comparison of the
variation of 6 to the tolerance limits permits ready calculation of percent defective by conventional
statistical theory.
Capability ratio = tolerance width/process capability
The comparison of process capability to tolerances leads to some broad plans of action:
 If the process capability is inadequate to meet the tolerance.
 If the process tolerance is equal to the tolerance.
 If the process capability is adequate to meet the tolerance.
Process capability measurement: process capability refers to the variation in a process about some
target value. Two techniques are involved:
Techniques that measure process performance, i.e., what the process is doing
Techniques that estimate the inherent process capability, i.e., what the process can do under certain
conditions.
Measuring present process performance: frequency distribution, histograms, probability paper, the mini
capability study, plot of individual measurements and attributes data analysis are the tools for this type
of study. It is highly preferable to use variables rather than attributes data, i.e., numeric data rather than
accept-reject information.