A defect that went global — and why it never should have When a micro-crack appeared in the aluminum housing of an industrial pump at Plant A in Brazil, the local QA team ran a textbook 8D, traced the root cause to machining pressure, and updated their work instructions.Six weeks later, the same crack surfaced at Plant B in Germany. Nobody there had seen the Brazil report, so engineers repeated the investigation, losing five shifts and € 320,000 in scrap. By the time Plant C in Malaysia caught wind of the pattern, defective units had already reached a customer. The…