
Evolutionary Operations, first described by George E. P. Box and Norman R. Draper in in their book Evolutionary Operations – A statistical method for process improvement, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1969.
EVOP is Continuous Improvement + Design of Experiments.
Basic idea is to replace the routine operation of a process by continuous and systematic plan of slight adjustments of the control variables. The effects of the adjustments are then evaluated just as with DOE. The process is then shifted in the desired direction of improvement. In many product and service processes it is impossible or very expensive to do DOE, especially where trials can be disruptive or the process owner would let you have the necessary time, materials, labor to run your experiments. So rather than running experimental production runs you use actual production by shifting off the base point left, right, up, down all within "spec".
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