Recently, Minitab News featured an article that talked about how to perform a gauge repeatability and reproducibility (R&R) study with multiple operators and only one part. This prompted many users to contact Minitab’s technical support team with questions about next steps, such as: “What can I do with the output of a gauge study with only one part?” and “How can I use the variance component estimates to obtain meaningful information about my measurement system?”

By themselves, the variance component estimates from the analysis of variance (ANOVA) output for a gauge study with just one part are not particularly useful. However, if we combine what we’ve learned about the variance for repeatability and reproducibility with some additional information, we can obtain a significant amount of information about our measurement system. We will also need to do some simple hand calculations.

 …