Process quality recheck for Gamma quality characteristic from supplier products: a case study on radio-frequency power

Abstract

Quality fraud seriously damages the right-to-known of customers. Therefore, it is necessary for customers to recheck the process quality level declared by suppliers, which is often measured by process capability indices (PCIs). However, there exist two practical problems when rechecking PCIs based on a quality characteristic (QC). First, QC data often do not follow normal distributions. Second, to enhance the market competitiveness, the supplier usually conducts a full inspection and eliminates the non-conforming items before selling them, which causes the QC data to be truncated. To overcome these problems, motivated by the radio-frequency (RF) power output data, this paper proposes a two-phase process capability recheck method, including data-filling and generalised p-value (GE-P) test. The novel data-filling method integrates the quantile-filling (QA) and bias-correction closed-form (BC) estimator for Gamma distributions, and simulation results show it performs better than the traditional methods on unbiasedness and consistency. Based on the filling pseudo-complete data, GE-P is adopted to complete the recheck by testing whether the process capability reaches the supplier declared level. Numerical analysis indicates it performs well on two types of errors. Finally, a real case study on the motivating example is presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.