Abstract

As industrialized nations compete more often against the low manufacturing costs of developing countries, manufacturing businesses are implementing Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) to increase productivity, improve quality and reduce downtime. MES solutions can greatly enhance the results obtained by today’s continuous improvement strategies like Six Sigma, Lean, and Total Quality Management. These improvement strategies all require the ability to gather timely and accurate measurements of a process in order to create improvement initiatives. The research contained in this thesis explores the most effective practices for strategic improvement applied today in continuous-process manufacturing. The two most popular strategy initiatives today; Lean and Total Quality Management, originated from Toyota and Motorola, respectively. These companies are discrete-process manufacturers therefore, the evolution and development of the two methodologies has focused mostly on improvement in discrete-process manufacturing. Due to the fact that much less development work has been done concerning the implementation of Lean and Total Quality Management initiatives in continuous-process manufacturing, this thesis explores this area.

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