Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service consistently functions well. It has four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product and service quality, but also on the means to achieve it. Quality management, therefore, uses quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality. Quality control is also part of quality management.
A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a manufacturing system in which there is some amount of flexibility that allows the system to react in case of changes, whether predicted or unpredicted. This flexibility is generally considered to fall into two categories, which both contain numerous subcategories. The first category is called as routing flexibility, which covers the system's ability to be changed to produce new product types, and ability to change the order of operations executed on a part.
Operations management is an area of management concerned with designing and controlling the process of production and redesigning business operations in the production of goods or services. It involves the responsibility of ensuring that business operations are efficient in terms of using as few resources as needed and effective in meeting customer requirements. It is concerned with managing an entire production or service system which is the process that converts inputs (in the forms of raw materials, labor, consumers, and energy) into outputs (in the form of goods and/or services for consumers).
The productivity-improving technologies are the technological innovations that have historically increased productivity. Productivity is often measured as the ratio of (aggregate) output to (aggregate) input in the production of goods and services. Productivity is increased by lowering the amount of labor, capital, energy or materials that go into producing any given amount of economic goods and services. Increases in productivity are largely responsible for the increase in per capita living standards.
A continual improvement process, also often called a continuous improvement process (abbreviated as CIP or CI), is an ongoing effort to improve products, services, or processes. These efforts can seek "incremental" improvement over time or "breakthrough" improvement all at once. Delivery (customer valued) processes are constantly evaluated and improved in the light of their efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility.
Standardization or standardisation is the process of implementing and developing technical standards based on the consensus of different parties that include firms, users, interest groups, standards organizations and governments. Standardization can help maximize compatibility, interoperability, safety, repeatability, or quality. It can also facilitate a normalization of formerly custom processes.
In macroeconomics, the secondary sector of the economy is an economic sector in the three-sector theory that describes the role of manufacturing. It encompasses industries that produce a finished, usable product or are involved in construction. This sector generally takes the output of the primary sector (i.e. raw materials) and creates finished goods suitable for sale to domestic businesses or consumers and for export (via distribution through the tertiary sector).
The three-sector model in economics divides economies into three sectors of activity: extraction of raw materials (primary), manufacturing (secondary), and service industries which exist to facilitate the transport, distribution and sale of goods produced in the secondary sector (tertiary). The model was developed by Allan Fisher, Colin Clark, and Jean Fourastié in the first half of the 20th century, and is a representation of an industrial economy. It has been criticised as inappropriate as a representation of the economy in the 21st century.
One classical breakdown of economic activity distinguishes three sectors: Primary: involves the retrieval and production of raw-material commodities, such as corn, coal, wood or iron. Miners, farmers and fishermen are all workers in the primary sector. Secondary: involves the transformation of raw or intermediate materials into goods, as in steel into cars, or textiles into clothing. Builders and dressmakers work in the secondary sector. Tertiary: involves the supplying of services to consumers and businesses, such as babysitting, cinemas or banking.
The tertiary sector of the economy, generally known as the service sector, is the third of the three economic sectors in the three-sector model (also known as the economic cycle). The others are the primary sector (raw materials) and the secondary sector (manufacturing). The tertiary sector consists of the provision of services instead of end products. Services (also known as "intangible goods") include attention, advice, access, experience and affective labour.
