The Use of Quality Control Tools for Continuous Improvement: A Perspective of The Manufacturing Industry

Organisations use quality tools to promote continual improvement across all functional areas and ultimately provide high-quality products and services. The primary goal of this paper is to demonstrate the significance of quality standard tools for evaluating and monitoring the improvement of an organisation, with a focus on the manufacturing industry in South Africa. These tools are essential and used in various sectors worldwide, mainly for continuous quality improvement purposes. Hence, the conceptual emphasis was made on check sheets, histograms, Pareto charts, fishbone/cause-and-effect diagrams, control charts, flowcharts, and scatter Diagrams, PDCA, DMAIC and Six Sigma, which constitute the statistical process control (SPC) package used to evaluate and monitor continuous improvement approach in an organisation's processes. These tools are used at various stages of the process to define problems, quantify their effects, identify root causes, and provide concrete solutions to solve them in order to ensure that production processes are free from non-conforming products. At this end, the scope of this paper will look into how statistical process control tools are vital and efficient in detecting and eliminating defects from the manufacturing process and provide some form of ranking to streamline the importance of each tool against others. Nevertheless, the analysis has revealed that as much as these tools are essential, the control charts are ranked top of the list as one of the most used SPC tools when it comes to promoting continuous quality improvement.