The Six Sigma Handbook, Revised and Expanded, 2nd Edition

18.3. PROCESS CONTROL PLANNING FOR SHORT AND SMALL RUNS

A starting place for understanding statistical process control (SPC) for short and small runs is to define our terms. The question "what is a short run?" will be answered for our purposes as an environment that has a large number of jobs per operator in a production cycle, each job involving different product. A production cycle is typically a week or a month. A small run is a situation where only a very few products of the same type are to be produced. An extreme case of a small run is the one-of-a-kind product, such as the Hubble Space Telescope. Short runs need not be small runs; a can manufacturing line can produce over 100,000 cans in an hour or two. Likewise small runs are not necessarily ...