Quality management tools in education

Want more quality tools? These templates will help you get started using the seven basic quality tools. Just download the spreadsheets and begin entering your own data. You can also search articles , case studies , and publications for quality tool resources. The authors explore how digitizing one of the seven basic quality tools—the fishbone diagram—using mind mapping can significantly improve the tool.

Don't Misuse The Pareto Principle Six Sigma Forum Magazine Four commonly held misconceptions of the Pareto principle are discussed that have prevented some companies from realizing the true potential of the principle. Upon use of the case study in classrooms or organizations, readers should be able to create a control chart and interpret its results, and identify situations that would be appropriate for control chart analysis. Cart Total: Checkout.

Learn About Quality. Magazines and Journals search. One minute you get it right. And the theory goes that by controlling these variables in any process, you can control the outcome.

Thus, making it more consistent. And with stable processes, you get less time spent firefighting and handholding things through that process. You also get great confidence it in being right every time. SPC is a way of measuring the quality within a certain process. This data is tracked normally using a Run Chart or control chart. The reason for using SPC is that you get real time information to see how stable the process is and can:.

It would be too much effort and cost to measure absolutely everything to the nth degree. And its overkill. The biggest impact would be to measure your key processes. This is the second of the 7 foundational quality management tools. Control charts are one of the main methods of measuring SPC. Control charts use the mean and standard deviations to measure whether a process is statistically in control or not. One of the first steps to understand a process is to map it.

By mapping, we can gain a picture as to what actually happens. And where the potential issues are that may be affecting the output and inconsistencies in our process. By looking at the inputs, controls, outputs and resources, we can see clues to help us find the reasons for inconsistency of output. The Valves must not leak in test. We want to detect any potential issues that we can bring forward to investigate further.

If you take this example, and using ICOR… our map would have several factors that go into the whole process. And by mapping it all out and observing the process, first, you can see potential problems and factors to investigate further. And the beauty of this is that it gives you so much to think about… So many clues to investigate and ask questions….

The yellow boxes are simply steps in the process. Above each step is the required output for each step in blue. And the green section below represents all the inputs to that step. This is important. It allows us to see how well each input is controlled to prevent variation and issues and gives us clues to see what may be impacting our process.

And where we need to tighten things up a little. In one map, you can see the process, the inputs and the clues as to what could be causing this variation, all on one sheet. It allows us to break the process down into small segments, and see how they all fit into the bigger whole or process outcome. The Cause and Effect Diagram is another one of the 7 foundational quality management tools.

This stands for Cause and Effect with Cards. This method helps you add observed data to the fishbone diagram and then add improvement ideas to that section. In The cause section the spines of the fish there are two different coloured cards for writing the facts and the ideas.

The facts are gathered and written on the left of the spines, and the ideas for improvement on the right of the cause spines. The team then evaluate them and select, based on feasibility and impact in improving the problem. In our Valve example, we may take a few subjective ideas from our map, and drill down to find potential root causes and improvement ideas, using several CEDAC diagrams.

Brainstorming is another core member of the quality management tools suite. It can be used in conjunction with identifying root causes through 5 why sessions and using the cause and effect diagram. In fact, it can be used just about on any subject where you have a small team analysing something. One post it per idea and in a short space of 5 minutes, get them to write as many ideas as possible.

When the team run out of ideas, get them to agree their priority thoughts and actions by each scoring their top ideas. Why use it? Each member of the group inputs their ideas of potential root causes and improvement.

Using this method, no idea is a bad idea. The object is to get as many ideas out on paper, quickly, until the group runs out of thoughts. Data is collected and ordered by adding tally or check marks against predetermined categories of items or measurements. Once you find a problem affecting the process, tick it immediately. Employees refer to the check list to understand whether changes incorporated in the system have brought permanent improvement or not. We can do it using a Pareto Chart. First, we could create a simple check sheet that the operators tally when they spot an occurrence of the problem, in a similar way to the above chart.

Bar charts are another of the 7 foundational quality management tools. They are a very simple way of demonstrating data; the height of each bar shows the frequency of the result. Again, in any form of communication, the less complexity the better, and Bar Charts are a very simple way of showing results of data.

In our Valve example, it could be that we just want to measure number of failures each day, or defects per shift. So we can see if there is a variance caused between shifts. In our Valve example, we may want to take all our identified variables from our ICOR process map and feed them into a cause and effect matrix. What we can then do is filter out the high scoring factors from the low scoring ones.