Process Quality Improvements in Global Production Networks

A key challenge for manufacturing companies today is to ensure overall process quality within their production network while working in globally distributed and dynamic environments. In this chapter, a description model to systematically analyze process quality across locations and identify improvement measures using a value stream-based approach is presented. In order to holistically increase process quality in the network, two evaluation procedures based on a hierarchical key performance indicator system are discussed. This method is especially useful in production networks, where certain products are manufactured in several steps across multiple plants.