Patent ID: 7176475

Claim:
An adjusting apparatus which receives characteristic values indicating quality of articles produced by one of m production processing devices from one of n measuring devices and specifies a device to be adjusted, where m and n are natural numbers different from each other, the adjusting apparatus comprising: a judging unit that, on the basis of the characteristic values received from the measuring device, judges whether or not the produced articles meet regular quality; a storage device that stores the characteristic values received from the measuring device in association with a sequence number in which the articles having the characteristic values are produced; a cycle detecting unit that, if the judging unit judges that the produced articles do not meet regular quality, on the basis of the characteristic values stored in the storage device, detects cyclicity of the abnormal characteristic value, which is a characteristic value out of a range of characteristic values when the produced article meets regular quality, indicating whether the abnormal characteristic value appears by m cycles or n cycles; and a specifying unit that specifies the device to be adjusted on the basis of the detection result by the cycle detecting unit.