What are Rational Subgroups

Variation surrounds us. The amount of time you spend commuting to work is slightly different each day. If you buy two bottles of soda, they may not be filled to precisely the same height. The light bulbs you purchase dont last the exact same number of hours. In some cases, variation is welcomefor instance, almost everyone welcomes a shorter-thanusual commute. But variation is not welcome in business and industry. When you buy a hamburger from a restaurant, or cash a cheque at the bank, you expect consistency. Slight variation is inevitable, but we are satisfied as long as it stays within acceptable limits. The teller who takes your cheque today may not be the same one you saw last week, but as long as you receive the correct amount of cash, that variation is acceptable. The fact that variation exists makes it imperative to use statistical process control (SPC) to monitor process behavior. We want processes to be stable, consistent, and predictable, because only then can we ensure the quality of products and services. Assessing process stability enables us to identify and eliminate sources of variation that adversely affect a process. A primary SPC tool for monitoring process stability is the control chart, first introduced by Dr. Walter A. Shewhart at Bell Laboratories in the 1920s. A control chart turns time-ordered data for a particular characteristicsuch as product weight or call centre hold timeinto a picture that is easy to understand and react to when necessary. These specialized time series plots provide a signal when there are unusual shifts in a process. Statistically speaking, control charts help you detect nonrandom sources of variation in the data. In other words, they separate variation due to common causes from variation due to special causes, where: Common cause variation is variation that is naturally inherent in a process, and always present. Special cause variation represents assignable or unusual sources of variation that are not typically part of a process. Special causes can be either detrimental or beneficial to a process. Statistical software makes it easy to create and interpret control charts, but those charts are useless if they arent created using the right subgroups of your data. Understanding and choosing rational subgroups before you collect your data and create control charts is critical, but the concept is frequently misunderstood. This case demonstrates what can go wrong when subgroups are improperly assigned.

What are Subgroups?

Rational subgroups reflect how your data are collected. They also represent the inherent variation in your process at any given time. You typically should collect data so that each subgroup includes only the variation that is naturally inherent to the process (common cause variation). Subgroups should be as free of special-cause variation as possible. The reason? Rational subgroups help you identify other sources of variation that may adversely affect the process (special cause variation). The control limits on a control chart, which help to signal when a process is unstable, are calculated using the variability within each subgroup. Therefore, it is important to select subgroups that represent only the common cause variation in a process. For many processes, you can form rational subgroups by sampling multiple observations that are close together in time. Examples include parts manufactured at the same time or created

by the same operator. If you sample ten parts at a time, then the subgroup size is ten. Or, you may sample say, one part per hour, in which case the subgroup size would be equal to one.

Case Study
Now we will consider how improperly assigned subgroups impacted a turbine blade manufacturers control charts and thus their assessment of their process. The turbine blades at this facility were manufactured on four- and six-spindle tracing mills (see Fig. 1). The tracing mill has a master that is used to generate four or six identical blades equal to one load that look exactly like the master. Due to the lengthy four-hour process required to manufacture these blades, only two loads are completed per shift, for a total of six loads per day. Engineers discovered issues with the quality of the blades at final inspection, so they had to find out why the blades were defective and fix the problem. To seek root causes, they decided to focus on a key characteristic, the chord length. In mathematical terms, chord length is the straight line distance between two ends of an arc. For a curved blade, the chord length is the distance across the opening of the blade from corner to corner. Anecdotally, the engineers were informed that the four-spindle mill, equipment number SCM4, was exhibiting the worst quality. The engineers decided to do an in-process evaluation of chord length using control charts.

The First Analysis

For many processes, you can form rational subgroups by sampling multiple observations that are close together in time and produced under similar conditions. The engineers at the turbine manufacturing facility used this principle to form their subgroups. Since each load produces four blades made at the same time by the same operator with the same tooling, the engineers chose to use each load of four blades as the rational subgroup, or a subgroup size of four. Data were collected and entered into Minitab Statistical Software (see Fig. 2).

Figure 2. The chord length measurements are recorded by spindle per load.

The engineers then created an Xbar-R chart to monitor the process stability where each subgroup (or row of data) included the four blades from the same load produced by the fourspindle tracing mill. The Xbar-R chart (see Fig. 3) showed an extremely stable process where all points fell within the control limits and no other tests for special causes failed. The process appeared to be in statistical control.

Figure 3.
Question1: What possible reason can you identify for this? Comment on the selection of subgroups. Question2: What is your recommendation to the engineers? What possible problem may they face now regarding the subgroup formation? Question 3: give your comments on the control charts shown in figure 3

The Second Analysis

A new Black Belt observing the result commented that perhaps the engineers choice for the rational subgroups was invalid. She said her Master Black Belt emphasized that, by design, a rational subgroup must contain only common cause variation, and should not contain special or assignable cause variation. An assignable cause is generally indicated if you can assign a name to a feature that is different for the samples within a subgroup. In this case, she pointed out, there were different features for each of the four samples within a subgroup, namely the spindle on which each blade was produced. Spindle 1 may be different from

Spindle 2, Spindle 3, or Spindle 4, thereby possibly introducing an assignable cause of variation. She recommended that the engineers use separate control charts for each spindle rather than using subgroups across spindles by load. Since the volume of blades was low, with one part per spindle every four hours, and the tooling was changed at the start of each new load, the engineers recognized that there were no logical subgroups. They decided to use a subgroup size of one and create separate I-MR charts for each spindle. The results showed that spindles 1, 2, and 3 were all stable, while Spindle 4 was clearly out of control (see Fig. 4).

Figure 4.

Question4: Why are the results shown by the first Xbar-R chart (fig 3) different
from the control chart plotted (fig 4) after the second analysis. How would you justify this?