ABSTRACT
Material losses may be in rejection before the process, by removal in processing or by rejection and scrapping of a product which fails to conform to specification. Industry has progressed from a stage where, traditionally, goods were made and sold, with quality depending almost entirely on the capabilities of the worker and his tools, to a stage where integrated systems, based on the control cycle, with appropriate measurements of both process and product, are used to optimize the conflicting requirements of cost and product performance. Correlation of sets of observation can be determined regularly at low cost by the use of computers, and this leads eventually to an evolutionary process whereby small changes are deliberately introduced into the process in a planned manner in order to determine optimum machine settings. The foregoing sketches the sort of continuous development which can be undertaken in an industry consisting of a mixture of chemical processes and machine operations.
