Read the following and comment on two responses from your classmates. When responding, adopt the role of the product manager and point out any concerns you might have with the response from the perspective of customer satisfaction with the specification?

There should be a difference between specifications and control limits. Specification limits are values set by the customer, stakeholders, or engineers and are therefore considered the voice of the customer (Summers, 2017 & Watts, 2018). This is what is expected or requested for the customers desired product or service, which is imposed on the process. On the other hand, control limits are the voice of the process and give an accurate picture of the capability to manufacture a product or render a service. As our textbooks state, methods arent aware of specification limits and behave to the best of their potential. However, they are related in that both are looked upon to increase customer satisfaction. Manufacturers would need both limits to determine how to establish a production method, equipment or machinery, and timelines.

As for process capability, the manufacturer wont be able to tell if he can produce a quality product or service under customer specifications if he doesnt know the process capability (variation). The goal will be to have a process under statistical control (only natural cause variation exists) that minimizes variation while meeting customer specifications (Summers, 2017). There are occasions when products could be under customer specifications, but excessive variation exists. The Taguchi Loss Function is a great example where a process produces products or services that vary while still meeting specifications (see Figure 1). Although the products or services are acceptable, they could still be less satisfying, and any shift in the process could produce a defective product or service. The Taguchi Loss Function demonstrates a situation when an organization is trying to follow specifications vice statistically based control limits and results in low-quality products (Kumar, 2019 & Miller, 2011).

Finally, a manufacturing operation can produce products meeting customer specifications even with natural variation by making changes that center the process and reduce variation. These changes could consist of the following: redesigning a process, using other materials, repairing or modernizing machines, improving training, etc. In this ideal situation, even when a process loses some control, products or services still stay within specifications unless there is a significant discrepancy/change (Kumar, 2019 & Summers, 2017).