Manufacturing Industry

It is fascinating to see the complex, interrelated processes that must function properly to sustain success in a manufacturing organization. From conception and design, to tooling and layout, to employment and training, to maintenance and reliability, to marketing and sales, to packaging and shipping; these activities combine and interact to ultimately define success or failure. In such a complex and sensitive environment, it is the synergism among these functions that best defines operations quality.

With that perspective, it becomes clear why internal business processes that generate problems so dramatically degrade operations: not only is the function itself impaired, and the down-stream activities impacted through effects that ripple and chain throughout the organization, but equally significant is the dissolve of the fragile and often elusive synergy that when present drives the quality of operations to the highest levels.

In the manufacturing environment, the strongest defense against recurring and cascading problems is a problem-solving process that keys to and reveals how systemic problems have occurred as a consequence of the interaction of inadequate business processes. In reality, the problem solving capability of the organization is both its first and last defense against losses. First when smaller issues are interacting to produce day-to-day losses, and last when those issues have finally come together to produce crisis. In both instances, the defining quality for adequate capability is the reliability of accuracy and completeness.

The REASON Root Cause Analysis Process provides a repeatable process with criteria for accuracy and completeness. The benefit of the REASON process is the discovery of all internal causes that combined and interacted to produce the problem. Management receives a decision support report that identifies root causes and graphically shows how all causes combined to produce the problem, a computer generated narrative report that explains step-by-step what happened, and an objective analysis that compares all available corrective action options for both control benefits and cost-effectiveness.

The REASON root cause analysis methodology is a thinking concept governed by rules and principles that have been integrated into the REASON expert system software. Deployment is immediately effective: the software strongly guides the user to pinpoint exactly what was necessary to produce your problem. Criteria validate results. Once the data are gathered, the software generates your decision support documentation in minutes: a narrative report, a graphic tree model and comparative analyses that provides solid decision support information.

For Corporate users, data then flow automatically into the REASON Corrective Action Tracking System and the REASON Lessons Learned System.