Reducing performance variation in the canning problem

Modern quality management practices recommend the elimination of fixed numerical goals, in favour of programs designed to continuously reduce the process variability. The ultimate purpose is a process variance which is small enough to (i) render conformance to specifications essentially a non-issue; and (ii) leave uniformity of production as the main goal. However, in far too many industrial cases, conformance still presents a serious challenge. For these cases, the paper proposes several models aimed at balancing the two objectives. Industrial and numerical examples are used to illustrate the main highlights of the models.