We’ve spent a fair amount of time learning the ins and outs of MSA’s, so this week I want to focus on process capability and how to understand the information you receive.
What is Process Capability?
In a nutshell Process Capability is:
• What it takes for your process to meet your customers’ needs right out of the gate with no modifications. This means for lack of a better term, inherent perfection.
• The information that can be provided on centering, variation and inappropriate measurement limits.
• The baseline metric for improvement
When determining your process capability there are three types of capabilities that we analyze:
• Continuous Capability- If you process is capable and in control, ideally you should get your desired outcome. This analysis measures the life cycle of your process telling you if the process has continued to be capable and in control.
• Concept of Stability-The idea of stability is the ability to answer the question ‘will my process produce the same result at this step every time it is used?’ To be technical, stability measures the ability of your process to meet its requirements at a regular and specific interval.
• Attribute Capability-This analysis makes assumptions about your data and is always long term data.
This week we’ve just scratched the surface on Process Capability. Next week, we’ll start digging a little deeper and show some illustrations of what it looks like.
