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Showing posts from May, 2011

Complying with AQS legislation while Minimizing Waste

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I recently gave a webinar on how food manufacturers in NZ and Australia can comply with the newly introduce Average Quantity System (AQS) legislation. These (currently optional) guidelines indicate how purveyors of pre-packaged good must verify the amount of product contained in the packages they sell. The big challenge is to minimise waste while still maintaining a high probability of passing an audit (0.99 say). As well as covering standard quality techniques such as Gage R&R and Control Charts, I outlined the use of the binomial distribution and the inverse normal distribution to calculate the mean of a process in order to pass an AQS audit with a given probability. To demonstrate the relationship between reducing variation and minimising waste I produced this animation . The area under the curve between 470g and 485g is keep constant, while the standard deviation is varied from 20 down to 3. At each stage the waste, a new mean is calculated and the area under the curve greate