January 18, 2022 | Ken Reed

Root Cause Analysis – Food and Beverage Industry Focus on Improvement

Safety departments in many industries are already using TapRooT® to help them understand the human performance issues that led to incidents. When someone gets hurt, they turn to TapRooT®. Had an environmental release? TapRooT® will guide them to the root causes. However, many industries haven’t discovered the power of having a simple, effective investigation tool available to their team. For example, how would the Food and Beverage industries benefit from a powerful investigation tool?

Problems the Food and Beverage Industry Want to Solve

The first step to helping understand this is to first list the possible problems the industry is trying to solve. For example, in the Food and Beverage industry, better root cause analysis can solve:

Quality control issues during manufacture
Contamination or damage during shipping
Obtaining the wrong raw materials
Regulatory involvement in issues related to our products
Customer complaints and feedback
Recalls
Poor internal audit results
Workplace injuries on the manufacturing line, in the shipping department, etc.
Equipment damage or failure in our facilities
Poor results during current investigations using inferior RCA tools (5-Whys, etc.)

A solid investigation is a great start, but once root causes are identified, it’s important not to stop there. Now that you know why the problems happened, how are you going to fix the problems?

Tired of seeing the same poor corrective actions over and over again?

We all run out of ideas from time to time and end up implementing the same weak fixes. Do these sound familiar?

Counseled the employee on the importance of using the correct tool.
Updated procedure to include…
Trained all hands on the importance of following the procedure.

Get more effective corrective actions based on true root causes and avoid focusing on the employees. What can we as a management team do to give our team the tools they need to effectively perform their jobs?

Using a simple yet effective investigation tool, guiding your team to true human-performance based root causes and effective corrective actions, can save you time, money, and effort when things go wrong.