2024 Improvement Goals

Developing Goals – Where Should You Start?

Improvement Goals: At the 2023 Global TapRooT® Summit, I discovered that many TapRooT® Users couldn’t link their use of TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis to their corporation’s goals. Therefore, I added the topic to the 2024 Global TapRooT® Summit agenda and decided that Amy Souders, Alex Paradies, and I would do a Keynote Talk/Workshop on the topic.

But I thought that many TapRooT® Users might want to start before the 2024 Summit (coming up on May 1-3). so I thought I would give you some suggestions now…

Corporate Improvement Goals

Many don’t know where to find their corporate improvement goals. Actually, getting started is easy. Just Google your corporation’s annual report.

I reviewed several reports and provided links here as examples (Chevron, ExxonMobil, Exelon, Nutrien, Eversource, and GE). In addition to financial goals, they included goals, objectives, and strategic priorities for safety, environmental performance, process safety, reliability, and operational excellence.

Many companies also publish separate documents with health, safety, environmental, and quality goals for the whole corporation or particular divisions.

Also, your site may have separate goal-related documents that link to division or corporate goals.

Finally, you should be familiar with your boss’s goals and how they relate to the site, division, and corporate goals.

Thus, when you develop your improvement program goals for 2024, you can link them to the corporate, division, and site goals and make sure you are in alignment with your boss.

How Can TapRooT® RCA Relate to Corporate Improvement Goals?

Let’s look at a couple of examples of corporate goals and how TapRooT® RCA can be linked to achieving the goals.

SAFETY/RISK

One annual report included a goal of maintaining industry leadership in safety. This goal was measured based on the corporation’s employee and contractor combined lost time incident rate when compared to industry association data of similar companies.

How could using TapRooT® RCA impact a company’s LTI rate? Several ways.

First, by analyzing precursor incidents and fixing their root causes, you can prevent more serious incidents that include lost time incidents. But how do you know which minor incidents are precursors? We wrote about that HERE.

How do we know that using TapRooT® RCA to investigate precursor incidents works to reduce serious incidents? Here are just a few of the Success Stories sent to us by TapRooT® Users:

• Improving Safety at Nine Energy Service
• Advanced Root Cause Analysis Helps Take Lost Time Rate to Zero
• Cutting the Incident Rate and Workers’ Compensation Costs with Advanced Root Cause Analysis
• SkyLine Mines Success Story: Using TapRooT® to Improve Investigations, Stop Fault Finding, Reduce Injuries, & Cut Workers’ Compensation Costs
• Improving Incident Investigations and Root Cause Analyses, and Reducing Incident Rates at Fernald
• Using TapRooT® to Reduce the Severity of Ergonomic Illnesses/Injuries & Cut Workers Comp Costs

How else can TapRooT® RCA be used to reduce LTI rates? It can be applied proactively when performing audits, observations, and assessments. For more information about using TapRooT® RCA proactively, attend the 2-Day Auditing & Proactive Improvement Using TapRooT® Course. The next course is coming up on April 29-30 and is being held at the Horseshoe Bay Resort near Austin, Texas.

One additional way to reduce safety-related incidents is to improve human performance. We created a specific course to help companies develop custom, target human performance improvement programs. The course is called the Stopping Human Error Course. The course teaches proven human factors techniques to stop or reduce human errors that can cause injuries, fatalities, quality issues, or equipment reliability problems.

ENVIRONMENT/RELIABILITY

Every corporate report I reviewed mentioned improving environmental performance and reliability. Applying TapRooT® RCA to improve environmental performance and reliability is very similar to the way TapRooT® RCA is used to improve safety.

First, you use TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis to investigate environmental incidents and equipment failures. Again, you learn from these incidents to prevent future incidents that include serious permit violations or equipment downtime.

You can also apply TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis proactively and apply the lessons from the Stopping Human Error Course to improve environmental and reliability performance.

Developing Your Improvement Program

Now that you can see how TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis relates to improving performance, you can start to develop your improvement program related to your corporate, division, and site goals.

A great place to start is by reading Book 2, TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis Implementation – Changing the Way Your Company Solves Problems.

Chapter 3 describes how to use the detailed checklist shown below to develop/evaluate your improvement program.

Aligning your improvement program with your corporate, division, and site goals helps you achieve steps one and two of the checklist.

When your program is clearly aligned with the corporate, division, and site goals, you can generate support from senior management by clearly explaining how your program will help them meet their goals. This starts with your boss and works its way up to whatever level of management support you need.

Items three through fifteen in the checklist are described in detail in the book, so I won’t repeat the details here.

How Can We Help with Your Improvement Goals?

How can we help you develop your improvement goals and plan?

Roadmap

First, we will be happy to talk you through the process and then assist you in developing a Roadmap to Success.

What is a Roadmap to Success? See a sample example below…

Of course, your roadmap would be specific to your corporate goals and the progress you have achieved in meeting those goals.

Then we can provide an executive briefing for your senior management.

And all this support is free of charge.

Summit

How else can we help? Past Summit attendees would tell you about the 2024 Global TapRooT® Summit. They would explain that the Summit will help you when you:

• Benchmark your improvement efforts with industry leaders.
• Network with peers and learn best practices to help you improve your improvement program.
• Attend the Better Improvement Programs & CAPA Track to get more improvement program ideas.
• Participate in the “Aligning Your Improvement Initiatives with Management’s Goals to Achieve Total Management Support” keynote presentation workshop and the “Implementing Your Best Ideas” sessions to be ready to return to work with your improvement ideas ready to be presented to management.

And that is just the start of what they would explain about what the 2024 Global TapRooT® Summit can do for you.

CLICK HERE to see all the Keynote Talks.

Achieve even more by bringing your improvement team and key managers to the Summit. When you do, you can SAVE by getting multiple attendee discounts…

And get even more improvement knowledge (and discounts) by attending one of the special pre-Summit Courses. See the complete course offerings HERE.

Where is the 2024 Global TapRooT® Summit being held? At the Horseshoe Bay Resort near Austin, Texas. Find out more about the resort by watching the following video.

The pre-Summit Courses are on April 29-30. The Summit is on May 1-3.

Don’t miss this highly-rated event. CLICK HERE to register.