Impact of information sharing on statistical quality control

With advances in information technologies (IT), the research and practice of supply-chain information sharing has a direct impact on the production scheduling and inventory control. However, few investigations focused on the impact of supply-chain information sharing on product and process quality. Furthermore, it is still not clear how and what information should be shared/used, and how to quantify the benefits of information sharing in terms of quality improvement. In this research, a "matching problem" is used to demonstrate the quality impact of information sharing. We quantify and compare the impacts of different information-sharing strategies on process and product quality, and indicate that real-time information sharing may lead to dramatic quality improvement for an assembly process, as an example of a two-stage supply chain. The proposed approach to evaluate information sharing in terms of quality improvement may be directly extended to a more complex supply chain.