“The Old Seven.”
“The First Seven.”
“The Basic Seven.”
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."
• 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.
• Check sheet: A structured, prepared form for collecting and analyzing data; a generic tool that can be adapted for a wide variety of purposes.
• Control charts: Graphs used to study how a process changes over time.
• Histogram: The most commonly used graph for showing frequency distributions, or how often each different value in a set of data occurs.
• Pareto chart: Shows on a bar graph which factors are more significant.
• Scatter diagram: Graphs pairs of numerical data, one variable on each axis, to look for a relationship.
• 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”).
Jim is the Director of Quality Assurance at Travel Tags
He has more than 20 years global experience in product development, continuous improvement and quality, enhancing organization's ability to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
Jim is a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence (ASQ). He teaches Innovation and Change Management in Business Process Improvement at the University of Minnesota. He is the Chair of the MN section of ASQ and presented quality and continuous improvement topics at multiple organizations and conferences. Jim is a local and national Baldrige Performance Excellence examiner helping excellence-focused organizations understand their opportunities to improve and continue sustaining their efforts.
Jim is currently the Director of Quality Assurance at Travel Tags, a local manufacturer, focused on strategically improving the Quality Management System, including transitioning to the 2015 ISO:9001 standard, implementing a Supplier Quality Management System and developing quality competency across the organization for a continuous improvement culture.
