5.10 Basic Lean Tools: Final Tools

In the Total Quality Management literature, there are seven essential tools that you can use to improve a process. In addition, however, there is a plethora of other tools, some of which you will study in later topics.

Among them are control charts. These consist of adding limits to tools discussed in this chapter to account for natural variation in any process.

Another tool is linear regression. As you studied in a previous subsection, this is a way to determine the strength of the relationship from a scatter diagram and will be covered in a later topic. With the increasing power of Excel and other spreadsheet programs, a regression can quickly build upon the scatter diagram data and is becoming a more commonly used tool to identify the relationship between two variables within a process.