Every field has various tools that help practitioners to do certain things. In the field of quality, there are seven such tools that are commonly used by all those who practice quality. These are very basic yet very effective tools and hence very popular in the manufacturing environment. These tools are:
Check Sheet
This is a very simple, systematic and structured way of collecting and analysing the data. A form with what data is to be collected mentioned in relevant boxes is the simplest example of a check sheet.
Histogram
To understand any data in a better way we should try and represent it using graphs. One of the most commonly used graphs is Histogram. This is used to represent frequency distribution of the data i.e. how many times a particular value is appearing in the data.
Pareto Chart
This is a modified form of a histogram, which is generally used to separate the trivial many from the vital few. In this, the bars are arranged in descending order of the frequency so that the important factors can be identified.
Stratification
In this technique, the data is divided using different factors in order to find patterns. For example, data collected for pizza delivery could be divided using delivery boy, day of the week, type of pizza, and so on in order to find out why the pizza was late.
Cause And Effect Diagram
This is one of the most common tools used for identifying the possible causes for a particular problem or effect. This is also known as fish bone diagram (as it looks like one) and Ishikawa diagram (based on the name of the founder).
Scatter Diagram
This is one more form of graph, used to identify the relationship between two variables. The two axis of the graph represent the two variables and looking at the plotted values the relationship can be established.
Control Chart
This chart is plotted in order to find out if the process is consistently behaving and nothing unusual is happening in the process.