There are only 7 basic tools needed to implement statistical quality control (and continual improvement); but why would you want to?

You may have heard of “Total Quality Management” or “TQM.”  If you have, you may think that its day has passed.  Well, it hasn’t … reports of its demise are … exaggerated. 

After WWII and even well into the 1960s, “Made in Japan” was synonymous with “cheap junk.”  In 1950, American Dr. W. Edwards Deming went to Japan to advise them on census issues and delivered a lecture to the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) on quality control.  Dr. Joseph Juran also delivered a lecture to JUSE on planning and management’s responsibility for quality.

Japanese industry adopted their philosophies wholeheartedly and 20, or so, years later (in the 1970s) the Japanese auto and electronics industries were “suddenly” crushing their American competitors.  Point of order here … Juran and Deming had been preaching their quality message to American industry for years before taking it to Japan.  American industry at that time was not ready to hear it, but getting hammered by the Japanese woke them up.

Consider that American industry had beaten the Germans and the Japanese in part by out producing them … American industry was, in a sense, still fighting the previous war.  But the peaceful war of trade was not being won by sheer volume.  But I digress …

Kaoru Ishikawa – professor of engineering at Tokyo University & father of “quality circles” – proposed the seven basic tools of quality control.  These have become known as the “seven basic tools” or the “seven old tools.”  There are seven “new tools” as well – these are management and planning tools which I will address at a later date.

The seven “old tools” will each be presented in a future post.  They are:

• Pareto chart or diagram
• Histogram
• Scatter diagram
• Stratification (sometimes replaced)
• Shewhart’s control chart
• Check sheet
• Cause-and-effect diagram (a/k/a Ishikawa or fishbone chart)
• In lieu of Stratification often either
  • Flow Chart
  • Run Chart

A word about data: collect it.  I guess that was 2 words.  “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” — W. Edwards Deming.  Collecting data can be tedious and the process may then be difficult to sell to team members – especially those who are “coding cowboys.”  The pushback will be that they have “real work” to do.  A bit of unsolicited advice: such people should be (VIPs) very important programmers … on somebody else’s project.  Your tools should facilitate the collection of data, but if they don’t then the folks need to …

To recap, after WWII, the Japanese took the quality control lessons of Americans like Deming, Juran, and Crosby to heart and went from being exporters of cheap junk to the makers of “the best stuff” – to quote Back to the Future.  Using the 7 basic tools of quality control, they rebuilt their economy and became synonymous with quality in manufacturing.  My upcoming mini course will introduce the 7 tools: Pareto chart or diagram, histogram, scatter diagram, stratification, control chart, check sheet, fishbone diagram, and I’ll toss in flow chart and run charts to cap things off.