In the early days of 1970's, while an increasing number of Japanese companies began to launch the TQC activities and the nature of the activities became company-wide, the scopes of the activities were expanded and the types of problems more diversified. To cope with such a changing environment, demands for new QC methods were rapidly developing, particularly among managers and staff. Members of the QC Methodology Development Research Group in JUSE (established in 1972) studied many methods used in Operations Research, Value Engineering and Idea Creation Method and so on, and then selected the seven methods which they thought were particularly well suited and easy enough to use for the problem-solving in the TQC activities. These newly arranged methods were named "Shin QC Nanatsu Dogu" in Japanese, and released in 1977. When these tools were introduced abroad, the direct translation from the Japanese name was used as the English name; the tools were called the "New Seven Tools for QC." However, this name was rather misleading as it might have given the wrong impression that they were newer methods than the "Seven QC Tools" and that the Seven QC Tools had become obsolete. To avoid this, they were renamed the "Seven Management Tools for QC."
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