Proactive process improvement offers ROI
A
Stochos product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Jun 15, 2004
Be it batch, lot, job, run, week's production - if you monitor your process output and change control variables to improve the output, PPI has potential to improve returns on investment.
Be it batch, lot, job, run, week's production - if you monitor your process output and change control variables to improve the output, PPI has potential to improve returns on investment.
The idea of replacing the static operation of a process with a dynamic system known as evolutionary operation (EVOP) was first proposed by George Box in 1957.
The basic premise was to develop a continuous, systematic method of creating slight adjustments in the process control variables (or factors), evaluating the effects on the quality (or response) variables and shifting the process in the direction of improvement.
Manually driven EVOP applications have had considerable success but often fall by the wayside due to heavy demands on staff time.
Proactive process improvement (PPI) automates EVOP and thus gain its advantages with smaller expenditure of staff time.
The automation is made possible with the availability of modern high speed, high capacity computing equipment.
Bidirectional communication with the plant control system, automated data driven "brainstorming" and EVOP make up the ROI improving combination.
The essence of PPI is to make changes in the factors you can control to improve or maintain quality in the face of the dynamic changes in factors that you cannot control.
PPI has no software limits either on the number of control and quality variables that can be evaluated or on the number of EVOPs that are active at any time.
Its limitations are only determined by the ever-increasing capacity of modern computing equipment.
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