Many companies, especially in high tech industries, are facing shrinking product lifecycles and increasingly complex production and product technologies. Selling many products in semiconductors, disk-drives or products in telecommunications has shrunk has shrunk to a time span less than a year. These market dynamics pressure production facilities to begin full scale production at a point when the underlying process technology is still ill understood. Consequently companies suffer from substantial yield losses, which can dramatically affect the economics of the product, production facility, and business. The production ramp-up will be defined as the time span equal to the difference between ‘time to market’ and’ time to volume’. A major goal of innovators is to reduce the ‘time to market’, but they cannot evaluate the effects on the ‘time to volume’. This paper will give insights in these interdependencies and compare two policies for the management of changes during production ramp-up.