Design and management of manufacturing systems for production quality

Manufacturing companies are continuously facing the challenge of operating their manufacturing processes and systems in order to deliver the required production rates of high quality products, while minimizing the use of resources. Production quality is proposed in this paper as a new paradigm aiming at going beyond traditional six-sigma approaches. This new paradigm is extremely relevant in technology intensive and emerging strategic manufacturing sectors, such as aeronautics, automotive, energy, medical technology, micro-manufacturing, electronics and mechatronics. Traditional six-sigma techniques show strong limitations in highly changeable production contexts, characterized by small batch productions, customized, or even one-of-a-kind products, and in-line product inspections. Innovative and integrated quality, production logistics and maintenance design, management and control methods as well as advanced technological enablers have a key role to achieve the overall production quality goal. This paper revises problems, methods and tools to support this paradigm and highlights the main challenges and opportunities for manufacturing industries in this context.