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SIMULATIONS

A problem you have to work, not read about.

You get a supplier, a pack of data, and a set of records that disagree with each other. Nobody hands you a clue. You have one day on site, people you have to interview, and a room at the end that decides whether your findings hold.

Worked examples show you a finished investigation. These do not. You make the calls, spend the time, commit to your findings, and find out afterwards whether you were right — which is the only way anybody has ever learned to do this.

AUDIT · SUPPLIER · ONE DAY ON SITE

The supplier audit

Six fictional suppliers: a gearcase builder, a CNC machine shop, an injection molder, a calibration lab, a sheet extruder and a maker of Rube Goldberg toast machines

You are the customer’s supplier auditor with one day on site. Read the pack — scorecard, complaints, the last audit — and decide where to look. Choose three processes, confirm the scope at the opening meeting, and interview the people who run them.

Everyone answers honestly, but nobody tells you anything you did not ask for. When an answer points to another process, you can follow the audit trail. Then you write your findings and defend them at the closing meeting.

Start the audit no account, nothing to install
YOUR ROLE
Supplier auditor
TIME YOU HAVE
One day on site, three processes in scope
SCOPE
Plan three processes from the pack, then follow the audit trail anywhere
TESTS
Audit planning, objective evidence, interviewing, following the trail, writing findings
YOU CAN TALK
Ask your questions out loud and hear the answers
AT THE END
A closing meeting where the supplier pushes back, then a report on what you found and missed

What comes next

Each of these takes a different method and puts it under the same pressure — limited time, imperfect records, somebody judging the result.

  • An A3, from problem statement to countermeasure
  • A DMAIC project, gate by gate
  • A defect reduction kaizen, with a week and a team
  • A supplier audit, against a system that looks compliant
  • A management review that has to decide something
  • A no-fault-found return nobody can reproduce

Every simulation is fiction. The plants, the people, the customers and every record in them are invented. The methods are real and the records behave the way real ones do — which is to say they contradict each other. No resemblance to any real organization is intended.

ASQ, the names of ASQ certifications, and Bodies of Knowledge are marks and property of the American Society for Quality, used here only to identify the examinations these materials prepare candidates for.

© 2026 Anthony Lenarz. All rights reserved.