Seven Basic Quality Tools

"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."

Included in this straightforward, how-to book is a description, when to use, procedure, and example for these seven indispensable quality tools:

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").