QUALITY TOOLS

Flow charts:

A flow chart is a pictorial representation showing all of the steps of a process. When to Use a Flow Chart: Two separate stages of a process flow chart should be considered: 1. The making of the product 2. The finished product
Run charts:

They depict trends in data over time, and thereby help to understand the magnitude of a problem at the define stage. Typically, they plot the median of a process. An Example of Using a Run Chart: An organizations desire is to have their product arrive to their customers on time, but they have noticed that it doesnt take the same amount of time each day of the week. They decided to monitor the amount of time it takes to deliver their product over the next few weeks.
Pareto charts:

These charts help to break down a problem into the relative contributions of its components. They are based on the common empirical finding that a large percentage of problems are due to a small percentage of causes. An Example of How a Pareto Chart Can Be Used: Pareto Charts are used when products are suffering from different defects but the defects are occurring at a different frequency, or different defects incur different costs. What we see from that is a product line may experience a range of defects. The manufacturer could concentrate on reducing the defects which make up a bigger percentage of all the defects or focus on eliminating the defect that causes monetary loss.

 Check sheets:

These are basic forms that help standardize data collection. They are used to create histograms. Histograms: A histogram is a bar graph that shows frequency data. Histograms provide the easiest way to evaluate the distribution of data. Examples of how histograms can be used:

Histograms can be used to determine distribution of sales. Say for instance a company wanted to measure the revenues of other companies and wanted to compare statistics.

Cause and effect diagrams:

They are also called fishbone diagrams, they show hypothesized relationships between potential causes and the problem under study. Once the C&E diagram is constructed, the analysis would proceed to find out which of the potential causes were in fact contributing to the problem. An example of when a cause and effect diagram can be used:

This diagram can be used to detect the problem of incorrect deliveries. When a production team is about to launch a new product, the factors that will affect the final product must be recognized. The fishbone diagram can depict problems before they have a chance to begin.

Opportunity flow diagram:

This is used to separate value added from non value added steps in a process.
Control charts:

These are time sequenced charts showing plotted values of a statistic including a centerline average and one or more control limits.

An example of when to use a control chart:

Counting the number of defective products or services:

Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA):

This is structured approach to identify, estimate, prioritize, and evaluate risk of possible failures at each stage of a process. It begins with identifying each element, assembly, or part of the process and listing the potential failure modes potential causes, and effects of each failure. A risk priority number (RPN) is calculated for each failure mode. It is an index used to measure the rank importance of the items listed in the FMEA chart.
Design of experiments (DOE):

DOE sometimes referred to as multivariate testing, is a statistical methodology used for determining the cause and effect relationship between process variables (Xs) and the output variable (Y). in contrast to standard statistical tests, which require changing each individual variable to determine the most influential one, DOE permits experimentation with many variables simultaneously through carefully selecting a subset of them.