Where does your company need to apply root cause analysis?
Root cause analysis is frequently used by safety and quality professionals to improve performance by analyzing the causes of accidents and issues and correcting their root causes so the accidents/issues don’t happen again.
In addition, forward thinking companies apply root cause analysis proactively to stop safety accidents and quality issues BEFORE they happen. (See http://www.taproot.com/courses#Proactive for information about our proactive use of TapRooT® Course.)
But where else should root cause analysis be applied at your company? Here are five ideas …
IT – Ever have computer issues, network issues, or computer security problems? Great candidates for root cause analysis. We’ve had people attend our public TapRooT® Courses and have onsite TapRooT® Courses to train IT folks how to find and fix the root causes of technical IT issues.
HR – Have you ever gad a union grievance because a union member was unfairly fired? Perhaps your HR department should use root cause analysis to identify the causes of disciplinary issues?
Operations/Facility Management – Safety/quality issues aren’t the only problems that operations and facility managers need to solve. Process down time, process upsets, schedule slippage, and building issues can all be investigated and fixed using root cause analysis.
Engineering – Engineers often investigate problems. They should be doing systematic root cause analysis (TapRooT®). But that can save millions of dollars if they learn to use Root Cause Analysis proactively to stop problems in the design stage of projects. All engineers should attend our 5-Day TapRooT® Advanced Root Cause Analysis Team Leader Course. It should be a standard part of their career development. Do you need to set up on-site training for your engineers? Contact us by CLICKING HERE.
Maintenance – It may be OK to have the occasional equipment failure occur. But I’ve seen way to many companies that have repeat equipment failures because the root causes of the equipment problems are not being addressed (and, even worse, are not even being analyzed). This can be costly. Replacement parts and maintenance personnel time can be expensive. Worse yet, equipment problems left unsolved can lead to safety accidents (when maintenance people are rushing to fix an issue that never should have happened), quality issues (when equipment failures cause quality issues), or cost overruns or missed schedules (because vital equipment was down). Isn’t it time your maintenance folks had a systematic troubleshooting/root cause analysis method (Equifactor® and TapRooT®)?
That’s some ideas to get you started. I think you will be amazed how much TapRooT can help your company improve performance if it is systematical applied to all sorts of problems and issues that really need effective fixes.
