Jerry thought that the audit had gone pretty good. Ralph had called several weeks before and setup the on-site audit. Ralph is a Quality Engineer for one of Jerry’s largest customers, a privately owned company with an eccentric and visionary CEO. Let’s call this company “CT”. …

The Ishikawa Diagram has been an old standby in Quality Management and other applications of structured problem solving for quite awhile. You may know this technique by another name: the fishbone diagram, the cause and effect diagram, 6M’s, etc. Let’s use a children’s story, the Pied Piper of Hamlin, to…