The more things change the more they stay the same…

I overheard a senior executive talking about the problems his company was facing:

• Prices for their commodity were down, yet costs for production were up.
• Cost overruns and schedule slippages were too common.
• HSE performance was stagnant despite improvement goals.
• They had several recent quality issues that had caused customer complaints.
• They were cutting “unnecessary” spending like training and travel to make up for revenue shortfalls. 

I thought to myself … 

“How many times have I heard this story?”

I felt like interrupting him and explaining how he could stop at least some of his PAIN. 

I can’t do anything about low commodity prices. The price of oil, copper, gold, coal, or iron ore is beyond my control. And he can’t control these either.

 But he was doing things that were making his problems (pain) worse. 

For example, if you want to stop cost overruns, you need to analyze and fix the root causes of cost overruns.

How do you do that? With TapRooT®.

And how would people learn about TapRooT®? By going to training.

And what had he eliminated? The training budget!

How about the stagnant HSE performance?

To improve performance his company needs to do something different. They need to learn best practices from other industry leaders from their industry AND from other industries.

Where could his folks learn this stuff? At the TapRooT® Summit.

His folks didn’t attend because they didn’t have a training or travel budget!

And the quality issues? He could have his people use the same advanced root cause analysis tools (TapRooT®) to attack them that they were already using for cost, schedule, and HSE incidents. Oh, wait. His people don’t know about TapRooT®. They didn’t attend training.

This reminds me of a VP at a company that at the end of a presentation about a major accident that cost his company big $$$$ and could have caused multiple fatalities (but they were lucky that day). The accident had causes that were directly linked to a cost cutting/downsizing initiative that the VP had initiated for his division. The cost cutting initiative had been suggested by consultants to make the company more competitive in a down economy with low commodity prices. At the end of the presentation he said:

“If anybody would have told me the impacts of these cuts, I wouldn’t have made them!”

Yup. Imaging that. Those bad people didn’t tell him he was causing bad performance by cutting the people and budget they needed to make the place work. 

That accident and quote occurred almost 20 years ago.

Yes, this isn’t the first time we have faced a poor economy, dropping commodity prices, or performance issues. The more things change, the more they stay the same!

But what can you do?

Share this story!

And let your management know how TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis can help them alleviate their PAIN!

Once they understand how TapRooT®’s systematic problem solving can help them improve performance even in a down economy, they will realize that the small investment required is well worth it compared to the headaches they will avoid and the performance improvement they can achieve.

Because in bad times it is especially true that:

“You can stop spending bad money
or start spending good money
fast enough!”