Pearn et al. (1992) proposed the capability index Cpmk, and investigated the statistical properties of its natural estimator \documentclass[12pt]{minimal}
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\begin{document}\end{document} for stable normal processes with constant mean μ. Chen and Hsu (1995) showed that under general conditions the asymptotic distribution of \documentclass[12pt]{minimal}
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\begin{document}\end{document} is normal if μ≠m, and is a linear combination of the normal and the folded-normal distributions if μ=m, where m is the mid-point between the upper and the lower specification limits. In this paper, we consider a new estimator \documentclass[12pt]{minimal}
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\begin{document}\end{document} for stable processes under a different (more realistic) condition on process mean, namely, P (μ≥m)=p, 0≤p≤1. We obtain the exact distribution, the expected value, and the variance of \documentclass[12pt]{minimal}
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\begin{document}\end{document} under normality assumption. We show that for P (μ≥m)=0, or 1, the new estimator \documentclass[12pt]{minimal}
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\begin{document}\end{document} is the MLE of Cpmk, which is asymptotically efficient. In addition, we show that under general conditions \documentclass[12pt]{minimal}
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\begin{document}\end{document} is consistent and is asymptotically unbiased. We also show that the asymptotic distribution of \documentclass[12pt]{minimal}
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\begin{document}\end{document} is a mixture of two normal distributions.