So if the root cause of a problem lies in how the work is being performed, it’s likely that you find it during a Gemba walk. One advantage of the Gemba Walk is that you get first-hand information about how a process is performed and become an eye-witness to any shortcomings the current process might have. Ask questions, listen and observe – don’t suggest corrective action during the walk (unless you find a safety hazard).Make notes and document your observations using a checklist.Focus on the process and its flaws, not the people.Let your team know that you will do a Gemba walk and plan your walk by following the value stream.This technique, also called management by walking around, is intuitive and easy to perform for manufacturing processes or tasks that require physical movement of goods, material or people. If your operations are remote, check out our blog post on Remote Gemba. If your customer support gets terrible reviews, take a few hours and sit next to your representatives as they take the calls. It may sound silly but think this through: If your third party logistics company messes things up, then visit them. If quality issues arise, walk (literally, walk) to where the problems took place and see for yourself what’s going on. The Gemba WalkĪnother powerful technique is the so-called Gemba walk. We will have a look at more structured approaches further down. Do that together with your team in a brainstorm session. So it’s necessary to run through the process more than once to give alternative outcomes a chance. The last point is also a downside for the 5 Whys: Depending on how you answer the questions, you might arrive at an endless number of possible root causes. It is an easy way to find a variety of possible causes. On the plus side, the 5-Why Method is very engaging and intuitive for your team to work with. In a next step, you can take this possible root cause and do something about it. Why? Dad took the list to go grocery shopping. Why? He didn’t have access to the shopping list because it wasn’t at home. Why? Because the person who wanted the shakes didn’t write the extra milk on the shopping list. Why? We used a lot of milk for some shakes but didn’t buy extra milk for this. Why? We used more this week than we bought. The following is a simple example of a 5-Whys analysis: When you have written it down, ask “Why” five times, iterating closer to the root cause. Write down the problem for which you want to find the possible causes. One of the most straightforward and most effective root cause analysis process to arrive at the root cause of the problem is the 5-Whys Method. In most cases, you will have enough information to start using them right away. The data quality and availability for many smaller businesses might not be sufficient to use quantitative tools so that this article will focus more on the qualitative tools. Generally, you can divide root cause analysis techniques into quantitative tools that rely on data and statistics on the one hand and qualitative tools that rely on logic and reasoning on the other hand. Root Cause Analysis then provides the tools for process analysis that are the basis for your problem-solving efforts. This means you have to be clear about which issue you want to address. In order to apply Root Cause Analysis, it is required that you already have identified what your problem is. The goal is to prevent a problem that has happened once from occurring again. It is the toolkit to determine the real cause of the problem. To find effective solutions for the future and fix the symptoms of a problem, you first need to understand what exactly went wrong. But in a second step, you want to prevent that from happening again in the future. The first step is to analyze and fix the issue at hand. Imagine you are an e-commerce company, and one day, you find that a product series in your online shop has incorrect prices and wrong pictures. The techniques described in this blog post aim to ensure that you treat the actual disease, not only the symptoms. Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is an analysis tool attempts to find the root cause of any process defect or inefficiency. Root Cause Analysis Tools What is Root Cause Analysis
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