Quality Improvement through Information Sharing

With recent advances in Information Technology (IT), research on and the practice of information sharing are exerting significant effects on many aspects of individual members in a multi-stage process or a supply chain. This research looks at how information of Statistical Process Control (SPC) and Engineering Process Control (EPC) is shared along a supply chain on a real-time basis for product and process quality improvement. It indicates that realtime SPC information sharing may lead to dramatic quality improvement for an assembly process, an example being the two-stage supply chain. Also, different strategies to use this shared information will have very different effects. Especially, a Modified Bounded Adjustment Scheme, one of the SPC/EPC methods, is much more efficient and robust than the other production control strategies with and without information sharing.