Comparative Performance of the Size Determination Method Using Quality Loss Function

This paper deals with the performance evaluation of determining production size specifications. A customer who does not find the size specification he or she wants may purchase rather a larger or smaller one, but the purchasing desire decreases as the difference between the required and the prepared sizes increases. Introducing a generalized quality loss function which reflects how much the purchasing desire changes according to the difference, Park and Kim(1992) formulated a mathematical model for determining the size specifications so as to minimize the expected loss. Afterward the model has been applied to the determination of sizing system for mail order clothing and brassiere (Lee and Choi, 1996; Chun, et.al., 1996). The performance of the size determination method proposed by Park and Kim is evaluated in this paper. Usually the intervals between two successive size specifications are determined to be equal, but the size determi-nation method compares favorably with the equidistance case, and more favorably if the population distribution is more skewed. 1. Introduction† In a modern multi item small quantity production environment, a trade off between diversification t