Mastering Seven Basic Tools for Quality Improvement (Excel)

During the post-war industrial revolution, Kaoru Ishikawa proposed seven basic quality tools to improve quality. These seven tools were the backbone of quality improvement in Japan. All workers, supervisors and managers were taught these seven tools to solve a problem and to improve the quality.

These were initially introduced in the 1970s. These tools are still relevant even after more than 50 years. By using the power of computers and Microsoft Excel, we can use them today to solve complex problems. Many organizations today might not be collecting data using the manual check sheets (which is one of the tools in this list), but the equivalent of that could be a pivot table in Excel.

In this course, you will learn the theory behind these seven quality tools and will also learn, to take the power of these tools to the next level using the current computing power.

The seven quality tools covered in this course include:

1. Cause and effect diagram

2. Check sheet

3. Control chart

4. Histogram

5. Pareto chart

6. Scatter diagram

7. Flow Chart

In addition, you will also learn about Run Chart and Stratification. Different sources list the seventh tool differently.

In the end, I will present two case studies, to understand how do we use these tools in different situations.

The first case study is for an organization that was finding a high repair rate for the painting job. That was leading to the rework of the paintwork and the waste of time and effort in correcting these.

The second case study is related to the use of Control Charts to ensure that the required product dimensions are achieved.