Two simple tools for industrial OR

Abstract

At the 1985 Annual Congress of the South African Production & Inventory Control Society it was pointed out that the productivity growth rate for South Africa is completely out of kilter with that for the western industrialised nations. The latter all display positive rates (some as high as that of Japan) whereas the rate for South Africa is - NEGATIVE. Partly as a result of this situation, more and more attention is being given to quality control and reliability engineering by our industrialists in their attempts to improve productivity. This is going hand in hand with the introduction of better techniques and better use of the latest technology. We should also give attention to analytical tools that may be used in a simple inexpensive way to improve our methods of analysing industrial data, and in this way to improve our performance at little or no additional cost. To this end two tools are discussed. They are by means new. But it does seem as though they could be more widely applied in the industrial milieu.