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Plastics manufacturing is a highly interdisciplinary endeavor requiring knowledge related to materials science, physics, engineering, and management. Because of this diversity, the plastics process engineer interacts with many stakeholders including customers, designers, materials suppliers, machine builders, mold/die suppliers, systems integrators, operators, quality engineers, managers, and others. With so many stakeholders involved, it isn't surprising that many plastics manufacturing processes are not precisely engineered systems. The resulting processes can be poorly designed, requiring too much investment to achieve too little productivity. This book was written to educate and support plastics processing engineers, but it is also highly useful to others involved with plastics manufacturing who are performing process development, research, and even machinery design. A manufacturing systems engineering approach was used to provide guidance about plastics manufacturing as an integrated system with broadly applicable analysis of the underlying subsystems.
