Identifying Sources of Variation in Sheet Metal Stamping

Abstract

Manufacturers using traditional process control charts to monitor their sheet metal stamping processes often encounter out-of-control signals indicating that the process mean has changed. Unfortunately, a sheet metal stamping process does not have the necessary adjustability in its process variable input settings to allow easily correcting the mean response in an out-of-control condition. Hence the signals often go ignored. Accordingly, manufacturers are unaware of how much these changes in the mean inflate the variance in the process output.