However, the market advantages of the former are clear: better tailoring to specific customer demand, improved responsiveness and lower inventory requirements for finished goods. Nevertheless, this production scheme has traditionally yielded lower quality output because of variation. This is a fact of life for modern manufacturers, but there is still a need for improved quality and lower operational costs.
Despite changing needs from customers, manufacturers can make their processes so robust that in fact, they seem like low-variation processes and thus yield the optimization opportunities of high-volume production.
