Assessment of Cpm in the presence of measurement errors

With the advent of Taguchi's loss function, the concept of target and sticking to the target to achieve better process performance has become widely accepted. In practice, while estimating process performance, the gauge measurement error is not taken into consideration. In the real world scenario this hardly happens since measurement errors cannot be avoided in most of the manufacturing processes. Ignoring this measurement error while estimating the process capability may often lead to unreliable/wrong decision about the capability of the process under study. Therefore, in this work we apply the method of Generalized Confidence Interval (GCI) to measure the process capability index C-pm in presence of measurement errors. In this study, an exhaustive set of simulation has been conducted to assess the performance of the GCI method in terms of expected value of generalized lower confidence limit (L-pm) and Coverage Probability (CP). The efficacy of dealing with the measurement error has been found satisfactory in this model. Finally it can be concluded that GCI method seems to be quite satisfactory for measuring process capability when the measurement errors are present; as well as when measurement error is negligible.