Nowadays, Internet technology has become part of our lives. It impacts not only on our daily lives, but also on the manner in which we conduct business. With the assistance of Internet technology, market globalization can be realized. Nevertheless, manufacturing quality is still a decisive factor for global market competition, and there is no doubt that exploring an effective statistical method to improve process quality in a complex manufacturing system is an issue. Yet, the impact of Internet technology on traditional Statistical Process Control (SPC) has not been well recognized by researchers. Therefore, these two related topics, statistical quality technology in multistage process control and information technology and SPC, are discussed in this thesis....[ Read more ]

Nowadays, Internet technology has become part of our lives. It impacts not only on our daily lives, but also on the manner in which we conduct business. With the assistance of Internet technology, market globalization can be realized. Nevertheless, manufacturing quality is still a decisive factor for global market competition, and there is no doubt that exploring an effective statistical method to improve process quality in a complex manufacturing system is an issue. Yet, the impact of Internet technology on traditional Statistical Process Control (SPC) has not been well recognized by researchers. Therefore, these two related topics, statistical quality technology in multistage process control and information technology and SPC, are discussed in this thesis.

In this thesis, two approaches to improve overall process capability in a multistage process by conducting process capability analysis are introduced. Using the results of analysis, the amount of reduction of specific process variance and improvement of specific process capability can be determined. A set of guidelines is established to indicate the necessary improvement of specific process capability in a multistage process. Two real case examples are demonstrated to show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. In addition, the impact of Web-based applications on SPC is also evaluated. Analytical tools, such as Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis, Activity-based Costing (ABC) analysis, simulation and Design of Experiment (DOE), are used to analyse and quantify the impact on applying Web-based SPC system. The result of the quantitative study shows that there is a significant improvement on time spent, cost and production quality. At the end of this thesis, the idea of a statistical and information based multistage process control system is proposed, and the further research is explored.