Bob was an outside salesman in from the field for a sales meeting at the plant. We asked him to stop by to participate with a problem-solving team assigned to one of his customers, ABC Co. We’d tried everything, so we thought, to correct a defect in a product that we produced for ABC.

The product was a temperature sensor with three Teflon-coated lead wires. The lead wires were, in turn, covered with a protective copper overbraid. The defect involved a small nick in the Teflon insulation on one of the wires. We knew the nick was caused by a stripping operation that removed a section of the copper overbraid from the sensor.

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