Measuring manufacturing capability based on lower confidence bounds of C _pmk applied to current transmitter process

Abstract

Several process capability indices, including C _p, C _pk, and C _pm, have been proposed to provide numerical measures on manufacturing potential and actual performance. Combining the advantages of those indices, a more advanced index C _pmk is proposed, taking the process variation, centre of the specification tolerance, and the proximity to the target value into account, which has been shown to be a useful capability index for manufacturing processes with two-sided specification limits. In this paper, we consider the estimation of C _pmk, and we develop an efficient algorithm to compute the lower confidence bounds on C _pmk based on the estimation, which presents a measure on the minimum manufacturing capability of the process based on the sample data. We also provide tables for practitioners to use in measuring their processes. A real-world example of current transmitters taken from a microelectronics device manufacturing process is investigated to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach. Our implementation of the existing statistical theory for manufacturing capability assessment bridges the gap between the theoretical development and the in-plant applications.