What would you do if you were faced with shortage of materials due to a natural disaster? With the limited inventories used today your business could be susceptible to supply chain interruptions. Short term interruptions can be dealt with but what if the problem was longer term and you could not make the product any longer? What could you do? You could begin immediate experimentation to find substitute materials but that might take months to execute.

 

Products that are designed through traditional methods find good feasible solutions but do not create models that can predict performance over a broad range of scenarios. If a comprehensive experimental program is developed using modern design of experiments, projects cannot only find optimal solutions they can leave a legacy of models used for continual improvement and maintenance for extenuating circumstances.

 

In this real live scenario, a major natural disaster, disrupted supply chains for a multi-billion dollar brand, but because this brand had developed predictive models of performance and cost over a broad range of inputs, the brand was readjusted and verified within days of the supply chain interruption. As a result shipments were met and the consumer still received a superior product at low cost.