I am attending an in-house Six Sigma Green Belt training class which meets every other Thursday for the entire day. Today we covered process capability and learned about Cp and Cpk indexes. We were asked to create a data set to work from. The instructions were to build a paper plane and to launch it towards a target six feet away. The target was calibrated in distance from the floor in inches. The objective was to hit the 60 inch mark as consistently as our plane would allow, recording 30 attempts to use for our analysis. We were told there were no rules so I opted to make a pneumatically launched space capsule (a blow dart gun by another name). For the Six Sigma folks out there our “aircraft” and launcher produced a Cpk of 1.75 which is an extremely good result. Of course the purpose of the exercise was to gather and crunch the numbers, but it was fun applying a creative solution to the underlying design challenge as well.