Root Cause Analysis
Course record permalink
- Format — Workshop, 4 hours
- Audience — Operations, quality, and process owners; plant and site managers
- Practice area — Business analytics
- Led by — Dr. Kevin Westbrook — background and credentials
Recurring problems are usually not mysteries. They are the result of a fix applied to a symptom, then another, then another. Root cause analysis is the alternative: a disciplined route from a problem as it was reported to the cause that actually produced it — and then to a correction that stays corrected. This workshop teaches the method and applies it to the participants' own cases.
What the workshop covers permalink
- Defining the problem. Turning a complaint into a problem that can be analysed: the questions that matter, the information and decision trees around them, and a hypothesis worth testing.
- Organizing the analysis. Mapping the process and the content around it, so the evidence collected is the evidence that can settle the question rather than the evidence that is easy to gather.
- Finding causal factors. The analysis methods that separate what happened from why it happened, and the difference between a routine cause and the root one.
- Correcting it. A tactical plan with owners, a risk assessment, and the indicators that show the correction worked rather than moved the problem.
Who it suits permalink
Operations and quality leaders facing a recurring failure, and process owners who have inherited a fix that did not hold. It suits manufacturers, distributors, and service operations alike; the method is not industry-specific, and it needs no statistical software — the tools are the ones a site already has: process maps, timelines, and the data behind them. It pairs with Business analytics, where the measures come from.
What a workshop group leaves with permalink
One real problem defined well enough to analyse, a map of where to look, and a correction plan with measures attached. Participants work on their own case rather than a textbook one.