MANUFACTURING PROGRESS FUNCTIONS FOR TYPES OF PROCESSES

SUMMARY After a brief review of the literature, studies are described investigating the following hypotheses: (1) Each basic manufacturing operation has an individual progress function. (2) Progress function for a product is a lime proportion-weighted combination of the individual manufacturing progress functions. The study covered ten machine shop processes involving nine products in three Companies. The method of combining individual progress functions into product functions was tried and the results compared with the actual product functions. A discussion follows concerning the reasons for the variations found during the study and some of the limitations of the study.