A study on the Ishikawa's original basic tools of quality control in South American companies: results from a pilot survey and directions for further research

Antony, Jiju, McDermott, Olivia, Sony, Michael, Fernandes, Marcelo Machado, & Ribeiro, Renan Vilella Cardoso. (2021). A study on the Ishikawa's original basic tools of quality control in South American companies: results from a pilot survey and directions for further research. The TQM Journal, doi:10.1108/TQM-01-2021-0004

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to revisit Dr. Ishikawa s statement: 95% of problems in processes can be accomplished using the 7 Quality Control (QC) tools from his book What is Quality Control? . The authors are interested in critically investigating if this statement is still valid nowadays. It involves the analysis of the usage of the 7 QC tools in the manufacturing and service sectors and the benefits, challenges, and critical success factors (CSF s) for the application of the 7 QC tools. In order to evaluate Kaoru Ishikawa s statement and how valid his statement is for manufacturing and service industries nowadays an online survey instrument was developed, and data collection was performed utilizing a stratified random sampling strategy. The main strata/clusters were formed by senior quality professionals working in operational excellence, quality consultants, quality directors, quality engineers, quality managers and quality supervisors working in both manufacturing and service sectors from South American companies. A total of 97 participants from different countries in South America responded to the survey. The main finding of this study is that only about 20% of respondents felt that the original 7 basic tools of QC can solve above 80% of quality related problems in their businesses. This is quite different from the findings reported by Dr Ishikawa in his work in the 1970s and 1980s. Another relevant finding presented in this paper is that Pareto Analysis, Histograms and Cause and Effect analysis are the most used tools in both manufacturing and service sectors. This paper also revealed that the 7 QC tools proposed by Dr. Ishikawa were least used by Human Resources (HR), Information Technology (IT) and Finance functions. This work presents a list of Critical Success Factors required for the proper application of the 7 QC tools. All data collected in our pilot survey came from professionals working for South American companies. So, this paper does present limitations in terms of generalization of the results. Also, data was collected at an individual level, so parameters such as the inter reliability of judgments on a particular survey item, could not be evaluated. It is important to highlight that n=97 is a low sample size, enough for a preliminary survey but reinforcing the limitation in terms of generalization of the results. Authors understand that this is the very first research focused on challenging Dr. Ishikawa s statement: 95% of problems in processes can be accomplished using the 7 Quality Control (QC) tools from his book What is Quality Control? . The results of this study represent an important first step towards a full understanding of the applicability of these tools in manufacturing and service industries in a global scale.

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Emerald

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Ireland

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Biomedical Engineering (Scholarly Articles)