Learn What the 7 Quality Control Tools Are in 8 Minutes - YouTube

Hi there. My name is Ron Pereira and I'd like to officially welcome

you to this first overview module of the Gemba Academy 7 QC tools course.

By the end of this module you'll know what quality control is, you'll

understand the benefits of quality control, and you'll know what the

7 QC tools are. You'll also begin to see how the

7 QC tools can help your organization improve no matter what type of work you do.

To be sure, you don't have to manufacture widgets to practice quality control as we'll

learn throughout the rest of this course. Okay. Well let's get things started by offering

a definition of quality control. And to do so we're going to hear from one

of the giants of quality control, Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa, the person credited with

defining what we call the 7 QC Tools today. Well when asked to define what quality control

was, Dr. Ishikawa said, "...that it consists of developing,

designing, producing, marketing, and servicing products and services with optimum

cost-effectiveness and usefulness which customers will purchase with

satisfaction." Now from this definition it's clear that Dr.

Ishikawa felt quality control was far more than visually inspecting parts

at the end of the assembly line. In fact, Dr. Ishikawa often spoke of Total

Quality Control or TQC which saw quality control spread to all facets of

the organization including front office tasks. So that's what

it is. Now let's now turn our focus to the benefits of quality

control. First, when quality control becomes a way

of life the number of defective products will decrease and as such, over time customer satisfaction

will increase leading to enhanced trust and loyalty.

And from an internal perspective, consistent quality control lowers costs for

the company since people aren't wasting time reworking parts and waiting

for good parts to be

produced and, as such, profits increase year over year.

So you see, done correctly, quality control reaches all aspects of our

business which results in happy and loyal customers.

Now then, the tools most often used for problem solving by organizations

well versed in quality control are called the Seven QC Tools.

Now for the rest of this module, we'll take some time to introduce them

and then throughout the rest of this course we're going to be taking a deep dive into

each tool explaining how they can be applied in both

manufacturing and transactional environments. But before we get into the tools,

I'd like to provide a little background on how these concepts developed.

And as it turns out, the Japanese began applying quality control during the

1930's and 1940's after Dr. Walter Shewhart and Dr. W Edwards Deming

introduced the concepts. Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa, the then head of the Japanese Union

of Scientists and Engineers decided to expand the use of these tools

in the 1960's with the introduction of what we now call the Seven

Quality Control Tools. Dr. Ishikawa chose these 7 tools as

a way to make the use of quality control accessible to anyone,

no matter their experience with statistics. Well the first of the 7 QC tools is the graph.

Now most of us have seen or used graphs at one time or another.

With graphs, data are expressed to easily compare quantities or quantity changes.

They're also used for arranging data, sharing information with others,

and making judgments. Now in our next module, we'll not only explore several

different types of graphs, but we'll also explain how to

choose the correct graph to use. The second QC tool is the Check

Sheet which are tables used to arrange data by type.

Now we also use these simple, but powerful tools, for checking if

jobs are completed without problems and for preventing

mistakes from happening at all. The third QC tool is the Pareto Chart.

Now Pareto Charts classifies problems and defects by type in the order

of quantities and shows the cumulative total. Now Pareto Charts are often used for checking

a problem or defect to be highlighted for solution.

In other words, Pareto Charts often help us identify where the problem

is as we learned about in the Gemba Academy Practical Problem Solving course.

Again as a reminder, Pareto charts get their name from Wilfredo Pareto,

the Italian economist who was the first to identify the so called 80-20 rule. Well the

fourth tool invented by the aforementioned Dr. Ishikawa is

the Cause & Effect diagram, sometimes called the fishbone.

Now the cause and effect diagram systematically arranges the results

of effects and the factors that influence them. With this

information, we're able to classify causes and their potential influence

on the problem at hand. The fifth QC tool is called the

Scatter Diagram which is a graph used to examine the correlation between

variables by plotting corresponding data. In other words, Scatter Diagrams

help us examine the relationships between two variables and whether

or not they're associated, or correlated, with one another.

Now, we'll get into different variations of the Scatter Diagram including

regression later in the course, but I do want to mention an extremely

important aspect of studying correlation. Namely that correlation does not

automatically mean there is causation. Now an example of this is how in some cases it

can be statistically shown that as the number of liquor stores in a

town increases so do the number of churches built. So one could

conclude that if a town hoped to have more churches all they need

to do is build more liquor stores, right? Well of course this is complete nonsense

since the two, liquor stores and churches, aren't correlated at all.

Now a better explanation for this situation is that as a town grows in population

, there'll be some who like to visit liquor stores and some who

like to attend church. Next, we come to the Histogram which

is a graphical display of numerical data in the form of upright bars.

With histograms, we're able to learn many things including how much variation,

or spread, a data set contains. Now when we add in customer specification

limits, which we'll learn more about later in the course, we're able to calculate

something called Cp and Cpk which basically tells us how well our

process meets customer requirements. And last but certainly not least,

we come to the Control Chart which is a tool used for judging the situation of quality

values against control limits in order to check the stability of a process.

Now Control charts also help us to understand whether we're dealing with common

cause or special cause variation which is an extremely important information

to know as we work to control quality across all levels of the organization.

Now we first learned about common cause and special cause variation in our

Practical Problem Solving course, but as a quick refresher common cause variation could

be likened to the normal everyday traffic we experience on

our commute each day to work. And special cause variation could be

likened to when there's an accident and traffic comes to a complete stand still.

Alright. Those are the 7 QC tools. As promised throughout the rest of

this course, we're going to take a deep dive into each one separately explaining how

the tool can be applied in both manufacturing and transactional environments. Additionally,

throughout the rest of this cours,e we're going to learn how

to create each of these tools using Microsoft Excel and Sigma XL

statistical software. Alright, well this wraps up this overview

module. In our next lesson, we're going to dive right into

things as we gain a deeper understanding of the many different kinds

of graphs available to us. So we'll speak to you soon.