Root Cause Analysis Blog

While performing your PROACTIVE TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis, you observe a person loading a pallet with 10′ L x 6″ dia. 30 pound metal pipes by himself. He lifts 30 pipes an hour 3 times a day from a rack waist high to a pallet placed on timbers floor level. This task used to be performed by two loaders before recent lay offs, so you go to the Root Cause category of Excessive Lifting and see these two questions in the Root Cause Tree Dictionary:

* Was the issue related to excessive lifting or force to move an object?

* Did the task require repetitive motion (lifting, twisting, bending, etc.) that lead to a musculoskeletal problem?

Since this is a Proactive Assessment there are no issues yet, so your are asking what is the worse issue that could occur by the lifting movements above? Now what does excessive mean? What would excessive lifting, twisting and bending be? We could bring in an external Ergonomic Expert… or we can use a simple calculation ourselves first?

A simple calculator: http://www2.worksafebc.com/calculator/llc/liftlower/Default.htm

A little more technical: http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/electricalcontractors/additionalreferences.html

NIOSH 1991 Lifting Calculator. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), 208 KB ZIP*.

As you start doing these calculations, you should also see another Root Cause under Human Engineering start becoming very apparent: Arrangement / placement.

A question that comes to mind from the Root Cause Dictionary is:

* Did poor arrangement, placement, or situation of equipment, displays, or controls contribute to an issue?

So with these new found calculators and a better understanding of just a little bit of the Root Cause Tree Dictionary is this task a risk or not:

” You observe a person loading a pallet with 10′ L x 6″ dia. 30 pound metal pipes by himself. This task used to be performed by two loaders before recent lay offs.”

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You can now vote for posts that you like at the Root Cause Analysis Blog.

Click on the thumbs up “Like” button under a story to let us know that you like it.

In the future, we can post more stories about things that people say they like.

Thanks for your help in making this blog more interesting for the readers.

Best Regards.

Mark

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It’s great when somebody says that your blog site rocks! And the Meerkats at Thinking Problem Management have once again bestowed their highest reward - 5 pineapples - on this blog site.

See:

http://thinkingproblemmanagement.blogspot.com/2010/01/blogs-and-stuff-that-rock-early-2010.html

It takes a lot of work to keep our blog site “rockin’.” I even had to sell my BMW M3 just to keep the Meerkats happy (find the previous award if you are interested). But it’s always worth it if we can keep … “Changing the Way the World Solves Problems” … moving forward to make the world a better place to live.

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There are the most posts for this blog (by number of direct clicks) in the first half of 2009…

1. What’s Wrong with 5-Whys??? - Complete Article

2. An Example of 5 Whys - Is this Root Cause Analysis? Let Me Know Your Thoughts…

3. TapRooT®’s April Fool’s Video

4. Where Does the Accident Pyramid Come From?

5. What’s Wrong With Cause-and-Effect, 5-Why’s, & Fault Trees

6. Switchgear Electrical Short Video

7. Friday Joke: Taking Cell Phone Use While Driving to a Whole New Level

8. Friday Joke: Are Any of These Accidents Waiting to Happen in Your House???

9. Golfing Accidents

10. Construction Safety

Please note that many people get a direct RSS feed or just watch the daily page. These stats mainly indicate the results of search engine activity and clicks from the TapRooT® Friends/Experts e-Newsletter.

I will check these statistics again at the end of the year (early January) to see if there is a “trend” in what gets clicked on by readers.

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The Chemical Safety Board has updated their website with a more powerful search function and access to numerous hi-resolution photos of various accident investigations.  The home page is here.
One way to prevent accidents is to learn from your own mistakes.  However, it is even better to learn from the mistakes of others.  The CSB has some outstanding information available for use in your own training and lessons learned programs.   Don’t miss out on this important improvement resource.

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WOW!

5 Pineapples (think 5 stars - or a straight A grade point average).

That’s the rating this blog (Root Cause Analysis Blog) received in October from Thinking Problem Management!

That beats The Tom Peters Weblog (3 pineapples) and many others!

We’ll keep up the good work and hope that people keep reading.

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As I hinted at yesterday, we’ve been working hard to get your TapRooT® System Software Dictionary Help File up to date and not corrupting your investigations. Well, we kicked it into high gear and today the update is available!

Click here to download the new TapRooT® System Software Dictionary Update! (7.8MB)

For those who already have the last update installed, this simply upgrades the existing copy. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us via the link at the top right of this page. Thanks!

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Hello everybody, and welcome to another Tech Support Thursday. This week we’re going to talk about the latest TapRooT® System Software Dictionary Update that you may have installed over the past few months.

The update was to bring the Version 4 software and its associated content in-line with the new TapRooT® Dictionary that was released with the latest TapRooT® Book. And while it was updated with the latest wordings and definitions, its formatting turned out to have a few issues. They have to deal with Root Cause Tree® analysis comments and the dictionary formatting. Two things:

• Bullet points (like the ones I’m using here) should never, ever be copied and pasted into Root Cause Tree® Analysis comments. If you do so, and you save the Causal Factor Root Cause Analysis, you will not be able to successfully import this incident into another installation until that Causal Factor is deleted and the analysis completed again. The bullet point character corrupts the database entry for that Causal Factor. Not rendering it useless on the originating machine, as you can still edit, look, and modify the Causal Factor properties and Root Cause Analysis, but any exported .TS4 files will not import into any other install and you will see a “Run-Time 91″ error pop-up when trying to import it.
• Quotes (” “) that are copied and pasted from the latest Root Cause Dictionary update will also cause this export/import issue. This is due to the character set used in the Dictionary Update.

Note that we’ve disabled any further downloads of the Dictionary Update while progress continues on the fixed version. The good news is, in the next few days you should see an update where you can find the latest version of the TapRooT® Dictionary that won’t corrupt your Root Cause Tree® analysis in the slightest. We’re working hard to get this update to you as soon as possible, as this problem just came to our attention recently.

Thanks for using TapRooT® and keep checking back for that update!

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TapRooT® Software version 4.0.6 has been out since April. Have you upgraded?

If you are at a licensed company, you should see your license administrator to find out the status (everyone needs to upgrade at the same time).

If you are using the Individual User version of the TapRooT® Software, the update is available on the TapRooT® web site. See:

http://www.taproot.com/software.php?updates=1

(more…)

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I know that with root cause analysis training and investigations all over the world, I sometimes have a hard time figuring out if I can contact my instructors. This site really helps:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/

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There are now 12,325 TapRooT(R) Friends/Experts on the distribution for this e-Newsletter!

To see the May e-Newsletter go to the Archives at:

http://www.rootcause.net/

Here’s a list of the May topics:



- LINDA UNGER’S COMMENT ON WHAT MAKES COMPANIES GO FROM GOOD TO GREAT USING TapRooT(R)



- WHAT “SEVERITY SCALE” DO YOU USE?

- MONDAY ACCIDENTS & LESSONS LEARNED (and other topics in the Root Cause Analysis Blog)



- 2007 TapRooT(R) SUMMIT KEYNOTE SPEAKERS SET

- PEOPLE SAY NICE THINGS ABOUT THE TapRooT(R) BOOK AND COURSES



- IDEAS FOR IMPROVEMENTS TO THE ROOT CAUSE TREE(R) DICTIONARY



- TapRooT(R) INSTRUCTORS TO PRESENT AT UPCOMING CONFERENCES

- SEND US YOUR IDEAS FOR THE 2007 TapRooT(R) COURSE LOCATIONS

- SEND US YOUR IDEAS FOR THE 2008 TapRooT(R) SUMMIT LOCATION

- VACATION & GET GREAT ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS TRAINING

- J.O.K.E OF THE MONTH

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This entire website was constructed by Paul Sipe (pictured), as may be found when not working on websites!

You can find Paul at Amherst Web Design.

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