The manufacture of industrial products is often a process chain comprising many stages. The proper-ties of the end product are influenced, therefore, by a series of individual processes which, though, interact in diverse ways. This fact has been taken into account only in seldom cases in the past when optimising the processes and operations. Nowadays, the data systems engineering prerequisites are available on the one hand, and there is also the necessity on the part of the customer to search for new ways of quality assurance at process level on the other hand.

This has led, within the scope of several projects, and in collaboration with steel producers and plant and equipment makers, to the BFI developing systems capable of analysing the correlations between quality-descriptive product properties and the influences acting upon them at different process stages. The systems are based on extensive quality databases, or DataWarehouse, which span the process stages and offer a multitude of tools for databased correlation searches (in which respect see also DataTools, DataWizard). Methods of multivariate statistics and computational intelligence, in addition to graphical and simple statistical techniques, are being used in this context. The data from special quality measuring systems (e.g. surface inspection, flatness measurement, etc.) can also be processed directly.