The new control limits widened by 14%. Points 14, 15, and 16 were still out of control—but now you knew why. The process was fundamentally unstable. You’d need to shut down the line for 48 hours. Replace a bearing. Retrain the third shift.
“But that’s the cost of a license.” price of minitab
“No. That’s the cost of not losing everything. That’s the cost of a second chance. That’s the cost of knowing that the person who came to this booth before you—a plant manager in Ohio—didn’t pay. He thought he could out-Excel the problem. Three months later, his line shut down. He now sells RV insurance.” The new control limits widened by 14%
“You’re here because your process is eating itself alive. You have autocorrelation in your residuals. Your moving range chart is showing a pattern that looks like a sine wave. And if you ship those parts, 12% will fail within 90 days. The recall will cost $2.3 million. Your boss will blame you. You’ll be fired. Your wife will leave. You’ll end up in a studio apartment above a laundromat, running one-way ANOVAs on your own failure.” You’d need to shut down the line for 48 hours
“One more thing,” she said, standing up. “The real price of Minitab isn’t the software. It’s the humility to admit you don’t know what the data is saying. Most people would rather go bankrupt than feel stupid. Don’t be most people.”
She slid a flash drive across the sticky table. “This is a script. It runs inside your existing Minitab. It corrects for the autocorrelation. It tells you the real control limits. It also anonymizes your session data so the license audit misses you.”
“The price of Minitab,” she said, tapping the bag. “$5,430.”