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2953 |
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Economics of Measurement Uncertainty and Tolerances |
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Today’s high value added manufacturing becomes tomorrow’s commoditized product. High value products imply manufacturing strategies and practices that exclude competitors. This involves intellectual capital that is protected either as knowledge (patents, trade secretes) or processes (unique facilities, deep institutional knowledge within the organization). In manufacturing, a persistent factor in the exclusion of competitors is the ability to produce increasingly complex components, with both higher accuracy and lower cost, which also drives product quality metrics such as improved function and higher reliability.
One aspect of higher accuracy and lower cost in precision manufacturing involves optimizing the metrology process on an economic basis. This involves knowledge of the product production distribution, the cost of the measurement process, and the consequences of bad decisions – e.g. rejecting in-specification components or accepting out-of-specification components. Recently a number of national and international standards (ASME B89.7 and ISO 14253) have addressed the probabilistic aspect of this issue. We present an extension of this concept by including cost models and hence an economic basis to optimize the metrology process; this yields a cost minimization for a given process. Furthermore, we discuss the implications of adjusting the metrology process to search for a global minimization for further cost reduction. We conclude by discussing the value added implications of employing software that contain a high level of intellectual capital on the overall competitive position of the firm.
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