The story of the Tower of Babel occupies but nine verses of the Book of Genesis, but it contains a valuable lesson for today: a multiplicity of languages makes it harder to run a workplace effectively. This is especially true when the quality system relies on controlled documents, as required by ISO 9001 and ISO/TS 16949. Robert M. Bakker cites in his "Why companies fail quality audits" (Manufacturing Engineering) three predominant sources of quality system nonconformances:

 …