Quality Control Chart Production in an industrial setting is often monitored for quality as the items are produced.

Manufacturers seek high quality products that are consistent with respect to various measurements. It is common to take periodic samples from a production line and make a chart of the mean of each sample. Such graphs are called quality control charts. Manufacturers are particularly concerned when the true mean of the measurements - the process mean changes. The samples of course exhibit some variability. How can we tell when the process mean has changed? The following page shows data for an industrial process. The first five columns, labeled X1 through X5, are 45 samples of size five each. The chart at the bottom is the control chart produced by a statistical system. The control chart shows two horizontal straight lines which are called control limits. They are labeled 3.0SL and -3.0SL, SL standing for "sigma limits". We want to explain how those limits are found. It is customary to call the production process "out of control" when observations exceed those control limits. Our chart shows six instances of this. We first calculate the probability an observation is more than 3 standard deviations from the mean on a normal curve. We find normalcdf(-3,3,0,1) 0.9973000656 so that the probability an observation is outside 3 standard deviations from the mean is only 0.0027, a very rare event. (This is true for any normal curve, not just the standard one used here.) Manufacturers then look immediately at their production process when observations are outside the control limits. It is sensible to center the control chart on the mean of the sample means, denoted by on our control chart. The data show the mean of each of the 45 samples. The mean of these means is 44.5 9, as the center line on our chart shows. This is . Now how do we find the 3 sigma control limits? The central limit theorem says that is approximately normal with standard deviation / where n is the sample size, 5 in this case. But we dont know . There are several ways to estimate from the data. The one used in our chart uses the average of the standard deviations of the samples. In the data sheet, we have calculated the standard deviation for each sample. The average of these is 12.981. Theory says that this must be inflated a little, in this case by dividing by 0.940 to give 13.80957. This is our estimate for . Our control limits are then

checking the values on the chart.

Data for Quality Control Chart

Quality Control Chart