Cpk and Ppk

In the past there has been considerable confusion on how to calculate C pk. This was one of the
reasons why Ppk was developed. The difference between Cpk and Ppk is the standard deviation
value that is used.
Cpk uses the estimated standard deviation, which is calculated as follows:

where

is the mean range value.

Ppk uses the standard deviation calculated from the individual data:

Cpk is used to measure the potential capability of a system to meet customer needs. It should be
used to analyse a systems aptitude to perform. P pk is used to measure the performance of a
system to meet customer needs. It should be used to measure the systems actual performance.
In most cases, the process capability can be considered acceptable if the Cpk is greater than 1.00
and the Ppk is greater than 1.33.

Calculation of Cpk

Cpk is calculated using the following steps:

First, we determine the relationship between the process mean and the specification limits in
units of standard deviations:

where:
• is the process mean
• is the estimated process standard deviation.
Note that this should be used rather than the actual standard deviation of the data (as shown in
the Surveyor results); the actual standard deviation is used in the Ppk calculation rather than the
Cpk calculation.
Once we have ZUSL and ZLSL, we select the minimum of these two values:

We can then calculate Cpk: