ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study that is intended to demonstrate the power of asking the right questions, and then by using simple tools, how we can get to the root cause of the problem. Not all problems are quite this easy to solve, but the reality is many of them are; we just make them difficult. The two tools we are going to use are the run chart and the Pareto chart. A run chart is simply a graphical representation of whatever we are measuring, plotted as a function of time. This case study involves a company that has been producing truck bodies for the transportation industry since 1958. The truck bodies are designed according to customer-supplied specifications, and then fabricated and installed on bare chassis purchased from various chassis manufacturers. The company employed seventeen full time engineers, and the performance metric used to track engineering performance was the amount of backlog hours in an engineering queue.
