From the MAW 93 postcard collection. Manufacturing is both increasingly fast-paced and internationally competitive.
New products can become obsolete within months.
And, in order to be competitive, many production processes must be revamped every year or two. In the face of these pressures, U.S. manufacturing needs to continually become more productive and competitive. Such improvements will most likely result from systematic approaches based on quantitative methods in the mathematical and computational sciences. The mathematical sciences have made many contributions to manufacturing. For example, statistical analysis reduces data from manufacturing processes and systems to meaningful forms.