ABSTRACT
There has been a significant increase in quality and productivity improvement methodologies in the past 25 years. However, to this day there are those who call into question the wisdom of focusing on quality because of fears of lowered production rates. In service as well as in manufacturing, unit costs are important, and unit costs are heavily impacted by the volume of work done by any given mix of people and machines. In addition, cycle time and speedy reaction to the market are important considerations. This chapter addresses these issues and demonstrates the links between variation and both volume capacity and cycle time.
