Introduction
A stiff manufacturing schedule and tight specifications
turned a bore finishing operation on a component into a
foreman’s nightmare, as performance of a complex
manufacturing system was marred by scatter well beyond
target capability, owing to a broad range of factors. A peculiar
pattern of deviations from nominal diameter was observed,
exhibiting inter alia a bimodal shape, as well as outliers
affecting mainly one tail. In the quest for identification of
main sources of trouble, statistical process modeling was
resorted to, uncovering some problems concerning empirical
distributions approximating those underlying data at hand.