22 • Root Cause Analysis
Stratication should also be considered when using histograms.
Ishikawa (1991) recounts a situation in which a histogram created to show
the hardness of sheet metal had a normal distribution. Sheet metal supplied
to the company by a parent company was oen wrinkled and cracked. e
company created two histograms on discovering that the sheet metal
originally came from two dierent subsuppliers. One sub supplier sup-
plied parts that where skewed to the le, and the other supplier supplied
parts that where skewed to the right; the true distribution was masked by
the mixing of the parts.
e same data that was used in a run chart or histogram can be used in a
Pareto chart. A Pareto chart is used to prioritize by separat ...