W. Edwards Deming

There's TPS, the Toyota Production System, and LEAN Manufacturing, which are basically development ideas of Taiichi Ohno of Toyota. Then there's the Six Sigma System strongly espoused by Jack Welch of General Electric, and The Great Game of Business, developed to a fine art by Jack Stack. If that isn't enough, add in ABC, Activity Based Costing, thought by some to be the answer to a maiden's prayer for manufacturing. By the way, don't forget TOC, the Theory of Constraints, by Eliyahu Goldratt. Also don't overlook SQC, Statistical Quality Control of W. Edwards Deming, for continuing improvement of manufacturing. Oops, we almost forgot to

Production standards are predictions of the amount of time and materials required for a form or job for purchasing, estimating, pricing and scheduling. Predictability is essential for process management of printing. Is the process of printing so nearly chaotic that time and materials can be forecast no better than next week's weather? Or can production time and materials be predictable—at least within ranges? The Central Limit Theorem (CLT) of statistics tells us that the averages of a group of individual samples will be approximately "normally" distributed. (CLT is the theory used by Deming/Shewhart in charting control limits for product variances.) For printing it