Enter your data for Normal Capability Sixpack

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In This Topic

Enter your data
Specification limits
Historical parameters (optional)

Enter your data

Select the option that best describes your data.

Single column

If your data are in a single column of the worksheet, complete the following steps.

Under Data are arranged as, select Single column.
In Single column, enter the column of numeric data that you want to analyze.
In Subgroup size, enter a column that identifies the subgroup for each measurement or enter a number that indicates the subgroup size. Enter a number for subgroups of the same size. For example, if each subgroup contains measurements for five items, enter 5. If you collected data over time without subgroups, use a subgroup size of 1. If you enter a column of subgroup IDs, the subgroup sizes do not need to be equal.
Note
Observations within each subgroup should be in adjacent rows of the worksheet. For more information on using columns to define subgroups, go to Using subgroups to assess process capability.

In this worksheet, the Diameter column contains the diameters of the piston rings. The Subgroup ID column identifies the subgroup for each measurement.

C1	C2
Diameter	Subgroup ID
74.030	1
74.002	1
74.019	1
73.992	1
73.995	2
73.992	2

Subgroups across rows of

If you have subgroups arranged in rows across several columns of the worksheet, and each row represents a single subgroup, complete the following steps.

Note

If you use this option to enter your data, all subgroups must be the same size. If your subgroups are arranged in rows and the sizes differ, you can enter a missing value symbol "*" in worksheet cells as needed to make all the subgroup sizes the same.

Under Data are arranged as, select Subgroups across rows of.
In Subgroups across rows of, enter the columns of numeric data that you want to analyze.

In this worksheet, the first row of the worksheet contains the diameters of the piston rings in subgroup 1. The second row of the worksheet contains the diameters of the piston rings in subgroup 2, and so on.

C1	C2	C3
Observation 1	Observation 2	Observation 3
74.030	73.995	73.988
74.002	73.992	74.024
74.019	74.011	74.021
73.992	74.004	74.005

Specification limits

To perform the analysis, you must enter a lower specification limit, an upper specification limit, or both.

Lower spec: Enter the minimum acceptable value for the product or service.
Upper spec: Enter the maximum acceptable value for the product or service.

Historical parameters (optional)

If you know the historical mean or the historical standard deviation of your process, or if you have an estimate obtained from past data, enter the value to use in the analysis.

Historical mean: Enter a value for the mean of the population distribution.
Historical standard deviation: Enter a value for the standard deviation of the population distribution.

If you do not enter historical parameters, Minitab estimates the mean and standard deviation from your sample data and uses those estimates to calculate process capability.

Note

If you want to specify the method that Minitab uses to estimate the standard deviation from your sample data, click Estimate.