Free Quality Tools and Where to Find Them

A free flowcharter is available from our Q-Skills site.

This flowcharter is specifically designed for quality improvement teams. It adheres to ISO9004 symbols and does not allow special shapes or drawing anything other than flowcharts.

The flowcharter is unique with it's automatic flow logic checking and validation. This allows reliable charting by unskilled users.

It has been designed to be very easy to use by almost anyone with automatic line drawing and automatic line re-routing.

It includes: 99 levels of subprocesses; Horizontal and vertical "swimlanes" ; An ability to record times, costs and user defined data for each step; Automatic calculation of overall process times and costs.

Another unique feature is automatic process documentation generation - files are saved in a form accessible by other programs to allow manipulation of data associated with the flowchart.

artichoke said:

A free flowcharter is available from our Q-Skills site.

This flowcharter is specifically designed for quality improvement teams. It adheres to ISO9004 symbols and does not allow special shapes or drawing anything other than flowcharts.

The flowcharter is unique with it's automatic flow logic checking and validation. This allows reliable charting by unskilled users.

It has been designed to be very easy to use by almost anyone with automatic line drawing and automatic line re-routing.

It includes: 99 levels of subprocesses; Horizontal and vertical "swimlanes" ; An ability to record times, costs and user defined data for each step; Automatic calculation of overall process times and costs.

Another unique feature is automatic process documentation generation - files are saved in a form accessible by other programs to allow manipulation of data associated with the flowchart.

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Which site is this, please?

See the web site in artichoke's profile.

artichoke said:

A free flowcharter is available from our Q-Skills site.

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It's a nice program, and I'm glad to see the emphasis on controlling logic flow. One thing--the "Download" button on the page doesn't seem to work in Firefox.

Jim Wynne said:

It's a nice program, and I'm glad to see the emphasis on controlling logic flow. One thing--the "Download" button on the page doesn't seem to work in Firefox.

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Even so, a remarkable free tool from an organization of only 3 people!

Wes Bucey said:

Even so, a remarkable free tool from an organization of only 3 people!

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Thank you Wes and Jim.

It is difficult for a small company like ours to be "visible" in the marketplace with our main product, the Q-Skills self paced training. We have hundreds of major clients like Microsoft and Florida Power & Light using the training but have found the free flowcharter is the best way to attract more business. We have found that being a small company has enabled us to be more flexible and responsive.

The flowcharting tool actually evolved from the e-learning. Our clients told us that their staff had learnt how to flowchart but their existing flowcharters were too complex for the average user ... and could we recommend something. Quality managers also told us that a major problem with teams building flowcharts was that they had to check everything the teams built ... hence the automatic logic checker. At times people, including myself, can be fooled by this ... I have seen very complex flowcharts that produce errors ... of course on thorough checking endless loops or whatever are found to be present.

You might also notice some word macros that are not setup in the installer. These macros are intended as examples of how you can automatically process the flowcharter output to generate ISO or other forms of process documentation. You might like to play with these.

Of course I should also mention, that if you can refer any Q-Skills training prospects to us, it would be most appreciated.

Here is one - Free converter for Engineering Guys

https://joshmadison.net/software/convert

Sathish

Just a quick note to say that, even though I'm new to quality systems in general and I've only been using artichoke's qsflow software for a couple of days, it defintely seems well thought out - restricting choices in the software leads to clearer thinking when trying to get processes "nailed down"
Thank you Q-Skills, I'd definitely recommend you guys.

henrikcar said:

Just a quick note to say that, even though I'm new to quality systems in general and I've only been using artichoke's qsflow software for a couple of days, it defintely seems well thought out - restricting choices in the software leads to clearer thinking when trying to get processes "nailed down"
Thank you Q-Skills, I'd definitely recommend you guys.

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Thank you for your kind words and support.

Re: Thank you Jim for the modification

pthareja said:

I too Thank you Jim for the modification, and to Xue too.
FreeQuality.org is a great help to beginners indeed.


P Thareja

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I found some very useful charts here. Thank you!