Communications Industry
An urgent call was received from a major communications company explaining a trouble ticket crisis. Cascading numbers of maintenance and operations trouble-tickets were overwhelming a network of seventeen help centers across the nation. Recurring problems seemed to resist every effort to resolve issues. Problems were assigned categories to facilitate handling, but numbers continued to cascade. First-in-first-out handling gave way to priority for major clients. Numbers of complaints rose beyond the initial problems to include dissatisfaction with service and response times..
How did REASON gain prompt control and within six months produce a steady, straight line quarterly decline of 11% in the incidence of trouble tickets in spite of healthy growth in sales? The answer goes to the heart of the REASON capabilities. REASON does not rely upon personal opinions and intuition for its answers. Instead, the REASON process provides an inquiry structured by logic and criteria for accuracy and completeness. As a consequence, the REASON process uncovers all of the factors that were essential for the problem to occur and exist, not just the ones that someone feels are important. By shifting some of the activity away from handling by categories, it was possible to discover many factors that were shared in common among categories and between big and small issues. Actions taken tended to broadly improve overall operations. Instead of a cascade out of control, trained personnel with REASON software provided the ingredients necessary to reverse a critical problem into a managed activity..
Another major communications organization set itself the task of discovering how much benefit it might expect to receive from formally conducting REASON root cause analyses on their operations problems. One major, recurring problem was selected for the team to resolve. After analysis, in the team member’s presentation to their corporate executive group, they reported that 23 separate systemic root causes were involved in producing the pervasive problem. Each root cause was identified and a practical solution recommended. The REASON root cause analysis report provided the executive group with a graphic model that showed how each root cause had combined and interacted to produce the problem, a case narrative that explained step-by-step how the problem happened, and an analysis that pinpointed which of the available prevention options offered the most prevention benefit both overall and for cost-effectiveness. These professional decision support analyses and reports are produced by the REASON software automatically in seconds, and represent technical analysis capabilities available through no other system, method or software..