Manufacturing

FaSinPat and Argentina's recovered factories

Workers at the failed Zanon ceramics plant occupied, restarted, and eventually secured the factory as the FaSinPat cooperative, making production knowledge and authority collective while remaining exposed to markets, aging machinery, legal dependency, and unequal participation.

Can workers preserve an industrial enterprise after owner abandonment by collectively taking responsibility for production, investment, employment, and political survival?

Intel

Intel's integrated factories could turn one process breakthrough into reliable output across many fabs, but the same coupling made a late manufacturing process delay propagate through the products designed around it. The memory exit, Copy Exactly system, and 10nm and 7nm delays show both sides of an organization that learns through assets too costly and specialized to change casually.

How can a company compound learning between design and fabrication without letting the factories and product plans built around one process turn a delay into an institutional trap?

Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product

A one-page control-chart memorandum inside Western Electric grew into Walter Shewhart's 1931 account of when factory variation warrants intervention and when intervention will make a stable process worse. The chart is its memorable instrument; the deeper achievement is to connect prediction and action to a particular system of causes.