(SPC Press: Knoxville, TN) -- Reducing Production Costs: How to Convert Capability Indexes and Performance Indexes into Excess Costs of Production and Use, by Donald J. Wheeler (SPC Press, 2010), is written for everyone who is trying to do more with less. Using a proven methodology of reducing production costs, it shows you how to evaluate paybacks so that you can pick winning improvement strategies. This approach is built solely on the process data itself. The techniques remove the guesswork and replace it with practical tools built upon a rigorous theoretical foundation.

Some of this material has been available for years, but there has been no serious effort to integrate the tools into a conceptual framework that promotes their effective use. Wheeler’s new book accomplishes this important task.

Join those practitioners who have been taught the conceptual framework for the techniques and have then used them with spectacular results. Their success is proof that this methodology, used as the foundation for improvement efforts, does work—and works supremely well—in practice. Inside the book, you will:

• Discover how the nature of data leads to two distinctly different approaches to improvement
• Learn how to get the most out of existing systems while using observational studies
• See how to quantify the excess costs of production
• Learn how to quantify the excess costs of use
• Discover how these excess costs are related to capability indexes

Reducing Production Costs is intended to breathe life into the “dry bones” of statistical process control’s computations and techniques. Powerful new graphics are included, along with 97 examples. Learn how to use the 20 reference tables to find excess costs for:

• Two-sided specifications
• One-sided specifications
• Target at boundary
• Changing nominal costs with aim

Learn the formulas for finding the excess costs for count data. Find all the computational details for the 10 tables of excess costs in the summary chapter. This book will guide you to an understanding of how simple and easy it is to continually and relentlessly reduce production costs. Which will lead, of course, to a better bottom line.

“No one gives a hoot about profits—if they did, they would be interested in learning better ways to make them!”
—Deming’s First Theorem