First-off inspection of capable manufacturing processes

This paper considers the problem of determining how much inspection should be performed before deciding whether a process ‘setup’ may be accepted and routine production operations commenced. A number of separate cases are considered, which together account for different practical circumstances which arise. The objective is to optimise the economic performance of the process. Separate objective functions are constructed for the different cases. General properties of these functions are established, on the basis of which easy-to-use algorithms for their optimisation are developed. It is assumed that the process is inherently capable of producing conforming product.