Bombardier spent a lot of money in trying to locate the Learjet 85 fuselage lay-up process in Mexico, instead of Belfast in the UK, only to find that the resulting parts were delaminating because the process had been developed for Belfast's climate and sea-level pressure.
Eventually the 85 project was 'suspended', as it remains today. Unfortunately most of the staff at the Querétaro site were laid-off as a result.
That said I just saw a talk yesterday about DNA folding and of course trying to replicate the experiment in a different lab caused a tenth of degree variation which voided the whole thing.
Ireland is a damp place; it doesn’t surprise me that carbon fibre layup didn’t work in the same way in Mexico!
It's also the where a fairly large printing company has it's central printing facility. Inside the main warehouse over tons of paper a fine mist if intermittently created, keeping the paper malleable. In a less damp environment this misting process might have to be intensified.
Shift in humidity = adjustment in drying of raw material & tweak to drying time as the product comes off the line = variability in total production time, for example.
Surprisingly, as referenced in the Bombardier example, adjusting to ambient environment is often manual/overlooked: it’s trial and error on the manufacturer’s part to make the adjustments necessary.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/241/...
It's a short tale about a sausage factory that moved from an old facility to a brand new state of the factory and discovering their sausages no longer tasted the same, despite using the same ingredients, etc. and how the eventually worked out what the difference was.
Depends on the industry. Some, like semiconductor chip manufacturing, go to extreme lengths. One plank of Intel's success is a strategy to measure everything they can, and calibrate every copy of a factory until they all line up. Don't try to figure out every possible causal connection, just control and copy exactly everything you can measure.