ABSTRACT
For years, people and organizations have dedicated considerable time and effort to identifying, reducing, and controlling the variation that exists within their systems. Variation exists in everything, but especially within a system. It's important for the people to understand that some processes will produce at a faster or slower rate than others, and this is the basic premise behind variation. Perhaps, instead of spending so much time and effort on techniques to remove variation, the focus should really be on techniques that will help the people manage variation. The pinion manufacturing process starts as the manufacturing unit receives blanks from the supplier. The immediate short-term result of this change was a significant reduction in throughput of pinions because of unplanned downtime. However, in the longer term, it forced the company to develop and implement a preventive maintenance system which eventually reduced the unplanned downtime to nearly zero.
