ROCESS CAPABILITY – THE BASICS: PART 1

By Carl Berardinelli
13 COMMENTS
1
This is Part 1 of a two-part article on process capability. Part 1 addresses the concept of
process capability and how to calculate it, including what to do with data that is normal and
non-normal. Part 2 looks at failure rates and material conditions.

What is process capability? From a conceptual view it is a measure of the relationship

between the voice of the process and the voice of customer (VOC). It is essentially a ratio of
the customer requirement (specification) and the expected process variation.

Process capability = Voice of the customer / Voice of the process

It is an expression of how well your process performs relative to the VOC. And it is a
prediction of how well your process will meet customer requirements in the future. A
capable process is one in which almost all measurements of a feature produced by the
process fall inside specification limits. There are several indices that are commonly used.

Cp
Let’s use a car and garage example to drive home the concept of Cp. The garage defines the
specification limits. The car size represents the process limits.

Figure 1: Cp
If the car is smaller than the garage, it means Cp > 1; the car will fit inside the garage. When
you find that your data (car) is smaller than the specification limits (garage), your process is
capable. It is, therefore, safe to conclude that you will not have problems meeting the
specifications. In other words, you will not have problems parking the car in the garage. Cp is
the specification width divided by the process width.