Quality professionals know the value of good measurement systems. They know that without trustworthy, high quality data you cannot make good business decisions. Unfortunately, most business people and many engineers don’t understand this value. Convincing them to spend time and money on a measurement system analysis can be a very difficult task. My goal here is to provide information to help you more easily convince engineers and business people of the value of measurement system analysis.
It all starts with noise. Noise is that characteristic of nature that causes measurements of the same item, by the same person, with the same gage to vary. Noise comes from various sources, but we are currently interested in the noise that comes from our measurement systems. Every measurement system is affected by some noise—the question is, how much? Only a measurement system analysis can answer this.