Quality Management Tools & Techniques Assignment (Other (Not Listed) Sample)

Quality Management Tools and Techniques
[Student’s Name]
[Institution Name]
Quality Management Tools and Techniques
Introduction
An analysis of process capability is pertinent in ensuring that the process is producing consistent results. It usually involves an evaluation of the parts being produced in order to check whether or not they fall within the specified limits. In case they fall within the specified limits, the process can be considered to be in control else the process will yield inconsistent results for process capability. In this context, histograms provide valuable graphical tools for assessing the process capability. In doing so, they visually present the distribution of data, which allows for evaluating whether or not the data is skewed or contains outliers. By visually observing the histogram, it is possible to determine whether or not the process is in control.
In this paper, the capability analysis for individual variables is applied using Minitab. This analysis yields a process capability report even when the data for the variables are not normally distributed. In this case, the manufacturing process produces a single hard drive using three distinct processes, hence the application of this method is suitable in order to evaluate each process independently. As such, histograms of the data for each process will be generated, which will help to verify whether or not the processes are in control.
In this case, three main measures will be used to evaluate the capabilities of the three processes including Cp, Cpk and PPM. The measure Cp is an index that measures potential capability of a process; that is, the capability of a process in meeting certain conditions. For a capable process, Cp should be greater than one. The measure Cpk, on the other hand, is a measure of whether or not the process is conforming to the required specifications (Bass, 2007). For a perfectly centered process, Cpk should be equal to Cp. The measure PPM (parts per million) represents the number of defectives in every one million parts manufactured.
Process A
 EMBED MtbGraph.Document.16 

Figure 1. A histogram showing process capability measurements for process A
By visually observing figure 1, the data is not normally distributed. Indeed, the data seems to be both bimodal and right-skewed. However, the data values are within the specified limits. The value of Cp = 1.41 is greater than one, which indicates that the process is capable. Additionally, the value of Cpk = 1.30 is almost equal to that of Cp hence the process is centered. On the overall performance, for every one million hard drives produced by the manufacturer, 18.29 parts will exceed the specified limits on the lower specification limit (LSL) side while 238.83 parts will exceed the limit on the upper specification limit (USL) side. In total, 257.12 hard drive parts will fall beyond the specification limits and this is a very minimal proportion.
Process B EMBED MtbGraph.Document.16 

Figure 2. A histogram showing process capability measurements for process B
As shown in figure 2, the data for process B is not normally distributed. The data seems to be skewed to the left but within the specified limits. The value of Cp = 1.22 is greater than one hence the process is capable. However, the value of Cpk = 0.99 is less than one and different from that of Cp, which indicates that the process is not centered and could benefit from improvement. On chec...