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The determination of the optimal mean for a manufacturing process involves a complex and financially important decision. This study examines a situation where a product is classified into two grades with respect to market specifications. It is reasonably assumed that each grade has its price and manufacturers cannot produce every item to a good grade due to the uncontrollable variation of product performance. This study attempts to determine the optimal process mean that gives a maximum profit to the manufacturer. The expected profit function for such situation would consider the profit associated with all product grades as well as the loss to the consumer upheld by the modern concept of Taguchi's loss function. A method for identifying the optimal process target that reflects such a situation is given by an optimization model. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the use of the model. Finally, discussion and conclusion are given.

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Warehousing can be expensive because order picking requires considerable vehicular movement and labor hours. Although many previous studies have focused on order picker routing, there exists a lack of research on the simultaneous increase of order picking speed and energy reduction in rectangular warehouses with varying levels of traffic in each aisle. This study accordingly developed and evaluated a mathematical model for determining optimal picker routes considering the total travel time and energy consumed. The results were validated using the brute-force search method and benchmarked with the time-staged (TS) model. The energy savings were determined by comparing a time-optimized use-case (T) with one optimized for both time and energy (TE). Both use-cases provided routes up to 44% faster than the TS and avoided more than 50% of congested paths, and TE which represents the full functionality of our model provided a possible energy savings of up to 17% over T.

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