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Quality pros have many names for these seven basic tools of quality, first emphasized by Kaoru Ishikawa, a professor of engineering at Tokyo University and the father of “quality circles.”
Start your quality journey by mastering these tools, and you'll have a name for them too: "indispensable."
1: Cause-and-effect diagram (also called Ishikawa or fishbone chart): Identifies many possible causes for an effect or problem and sorts ideas into useful categories.
2: Check sheet: A structured, prepared form for collecting and analyzing data; a generic tool that can be adapted for a wide variety of purposes.
3: Control charts: Graphs used to study how a process changes over time.
4: Histogram: The most commonly used graph for showing frequency distributions, or how often each different value in a set of data occurs.
5: Pareto chart: Shows on a bar graph which factors are more significant.
6: Scatter diagram: Graphs pairs of numerical data, one variable on each axis, to look for a relationship.
7: Stratification: A technique that separates data gathered from a variety of sources so that patterns can be seen (some lists replace “stratification” with “flowchart” or “run chart”).
