Can TapRooT® RCA Help You Stop Quality Issues?
A TapRooT® User Wants to Know About Root Cause Analysis of Quality Issues
Many people know how successful TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis is at stopping safety incidents. But I had a TapRooT® User call me to ask:
“Can TapRooT® RCA be used to solve quality issues?“
I was surprised by the question. Of course, the answer is YES!
We’ve had people using TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis to solve quality problems ever since we invented it. In our first consulting job back in 1989, we used TapRooT® RCA to solve engineering/construction quality issues discovered during an audit.
Why didn’t this TapRooT® User know that TapRooT® could be applied to quality issues?
The only answer was … We had not told him!
Root Cause Analysis of Quality Issues
Quality issues, just like safety issues, are mainly caused by human errors. And TapRooT® RCA is excellent at helping people find the correctable root causes of human errors.
Why does TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis work on all kinds of problems (including ones that cause quality issues)? Because TapRooT® RCA doesn’t care what the outcome of an error is. TapRooT® RCA looks for the correctable cause (or causes) of the error.
For example, an operator working in a factory may open the wrong breaker and stop the wrong piece of equipment. When he makes this mistake, he doesn’t know if the outcome will be a safety incident, a maintenance headache, an operations problem, or a quality issue. He wasn’t planning on making the mistake, and he certainly wasn’t deciding what kind of outcome his mistake would result in. And fixing the reason for his mistake will stop the problem no matter what outcome occurred after the error.
That’s why the examples in our standard 2-Day and 5-Day TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis Courses apply not only to safety but also to quality, maintenance, operations, and even hospital patient safety issues.
So, if you are wondering if TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis would work for the type of issues that your company faces, the answer is YES!
Attend one of our public 2-Day or 5-Day TapRooT® Courses or one of our Virtual TapRooT® Courses, and find out how well TapRooT® RCA can help you solve your toughest issues.
