Sometimes manufacturing can feel like a never-ending panic to get products out of the door, where it's hard to stop and think about exactly what you’re doing. You might feel the bitter blow of an adhesive batch that fails quality control testing, but never fully understand the key causes. But with slow global economic growth today putting many companies under pressure, thinking about how your company can enhance its processes can provide a valuable and ongoing boost to its profitability. This has been the case as long as there has been mass manufacturing, with concepts like statistical process control first emerging in the 1930s. Today there are a wide range of formalised continuous improvement philosophies available to learn.