Manufacturing vs. Production - Differences - TS 16949

[hejianls]

Is there anybody who could tell me the Difference Between Manufacturing and Production? Thanks

[madannc]

My interpretation would be

Production - the act of producing an item ... the assembly of parts to produce an end item

Manufacturing - process of physically creating an offering for a target market.

as an example, you may well produce a cup of tea to drink by assembling various ingredients together for yourself...

or you may well manufacture tea in a canteen for a work force, where the processes used to manufacture that tea will be aimed at efficiency.

I guess you could say that manufacturing is the art of streamlining production... maybe!!

Its still early only had 1 coffee so best I can think of... would be interested in other responses.

[Pudge 72]

Not quite sure where to go with this one.
My interpretation would be based on circumstance. It may be like seperating the terms such as the difference between Production and Prototype within the same facility. To me, as a manufacturer - I simply associate these terms that you specified as being directly related. If the term Production was used to describe a product's process within my manufacturing facility, it would indicate to me a description of where the product is at in it's lifecycle.
The term "Production" I would have to believe as it relates to manufacturing would indicate to me a process that has been developed and is robust enough to provide the customer with all facets of satisfaction, cost, delivery and quality. To get to this point, most of the quality tools that we are familiar with would have been utilized and implemented as well as Lean techniques. The product would have also gone through all of it's testing phases as well as validation runs.
I guess that Production is actually a subset of the manufacturing environement within which you could have many types of manufcaturing taking place - assembly, design, product testing, and as stated above, prototyping.
The example of why you are trying to distinguish these terms may be helpful in trying to determine what definition you are looking for.

[Valeri]

Bits from Wikipedia:

Manufacturing (from Latin manu factura, "making by hand") is the use of tools and labor to make things for use or sale. The term may refer to a vast range of human activity, from handicraft to high tech, but is most commonly applied to industrial production, in which raw materials are transformed into finished goods on a large scale.

Production may refer to: Production, costs, and pricing, the act of making things, in microeconomics

Specific uses Manufacturing, processing raw materials into finished goods

Looks the same thing to me.

[qualityboi]

We use the terms interchangably.

[QAMMAN]

I like to think of the two as being interchangeable as well except for this:

We manufacture both prototype and production parts for the automotive industry. So I rarely use the word production unless it is implicating production parts. I am also the production scheduler and program manager at our company (bit of a conflict of interest wouldn't you say).

I liked Valeri's reasoning. I was going to look the two terms up at Wikipedia but saw she had already done so.

[hejianls]

Thanks a lot for all of your inputs, I think the word "manufacturing" is a macro-economics term, and production is more specific to a certain process that conver input to output, hope there has more good inputs.

[Randy]

I think you're worrying too much over something that may be of limited value.

In the USA, in American English, the words production and manufacturing are often used synonymously, or freely interchanged one for another. Nobody really cares.