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Speci cation limits

What is process tolerance?

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Speci cation limits in capability
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What are speci cation limits?
How are speci cation limits di erent from control limits?
When should I de ne a speci cation limit as a boundary?

What are speci cation limits?

Speci cation limits are the values between which products or services should operate. These limits are
usually set by customer requirements. For example, you print labels for a shipping process. If the
labels are too big or too small, they will not feed into printers properly.

Examples of upper and lower speci cation limits

LSL = 2.5 USL = 2.687

The lower speci cation is 2.500 inches and the upper speci cation is 2.687 inches. Any labels that are smaller
than 2.5 inches or larger than 2.687 inches are unacceptable.
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 Supporting Topics

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Speci cation limits LSL = 80

Often, only one speci cation limit is used. For example, a chemical company requires an inert gas to be at least
80% pure. The quality analysts set a lower speci cation limit but do not set an upper speci cation limit because
What is process tolerance?
purer is better.

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USL = 30
Conversely, consider a call center where calls must be answered within 30 seconds. In this case, only an upper
speci cation is relevant because the quicker a call is answered, the better.

How are speci cation limits di erent from control limits?

Control limits are calculated from process data. They represent how your process actually performs.
Speci cation limits are de ned by your customer and represent the desired performance of your
process.

Speci cation limits and control limits are used for di erent purposes. Control limits let you assess
whether your process is stable. Speci cation limits allow you to assess how capable your process is of
meeting customer requirements.

When should I de ne a speci cation limit as a boundary?

Instead of speci cation limits, a process may have boundaries. You should only de ne a speci cation
limit as a boundary if it is not possible for data to exceed that speci cation limit. For example, a
chemical company measures the percentage of purity of an inert gas and de nes the upper
speci cation of 100% as a boundary, because the gas cannot be more than 100% pure.

Choose Stat > Quality Tools > Capability Analysis > Normal. Check Boundary to indicate that a
speci cation limit should be a boundary.
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 NOTE
Supporting Topics Replacing one of your speci cation limits with a boundary in Minitab yields a one-sided capability
analysis. If you select both speci cation limits as boundaries, all capability statistics will appear as
Basics
asterisks (*) in the output.

Speci cation limits

What is process tolerance?

Capability analyses in Minitab

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