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However, those sponsoring the projects
and the business cases justifying them, had had not recognised the existence of a root, core
problem. Their proposed solutions therefore had little chance of
materially improving the situation. The projects would consume funds,
resources and time, but unless they managed to suppress the symptoms of the
underlying problem, would fail to meet their objectives or satisfy their
business cases. Which was exactly the experience.
Under the Surface
By drilling down into the situation,
it became evident that a single root cause was manifesting itself in many
different and apparently separate, problem areas. At the core of the
situation was the variable success and unpredictability of a particular step in
the manufacturing process.
The effects of the variability in this one
step were leading to problems across the organisation in for example, Customer
Services, in IT Systems, in Production Scheduling, in Materials Management, in Purchasing and
ultimately in costs control.
In the diagram, the organisation's stated business goal areas are listed in the box in the bottom right hand
corner. The colour codes show the links to those goal areas in the
cause-and-effect diagram and show how the achievement of those goals is
impeded by the influence of a core, root problem. The root problem is shown
as 'Production Process Variability'. That is in this case, the uncertainty
that any given production batch would result in usable product and further,
unplanned production runs would be needed to achieve good product.
The Conflicts
The diagram shows how the effects of
that core variability would lead to (for example) Poor Customer Delivery
Date Reliability, which in turn led to angry calls by customers to the
Customer Services department wanting to know where their goods were? Morale
in Customer Services was desperately low because delivery date reliability
was outside the control of the department yet maintaining good customer
relationships was their responsibility.
The reputation of the IT
organisation and their systems suffered because the perception was that the
information in the production planning systems was not dependable. The accuracy of production
plans and schedules information in the systems frequently did not agree with
the way things had turned out in production. With the lack of confidence in
the in information, system users realised there was little value in trying
to maintain the information... and those running Production chose to work
around the systems in order to do their jobs. A classic 'informal' system
developed in parallel to the prescribed formal system; the informal system
was the real means by which work got done.
Shared Root Causes
This organisation wanted to address
a range of operational issues. The diagram illustrates that
many of the operational issues actually stemmed from a shared root cause. The
diagram also suggest that simply focusing on
the root cause would have been the most productive strategy and could have alleviated
a range of critical problems across the organisation.
Carried out some years ago,
the analysis unfortunately never reached a sufficiently senior level in the
company for its message to be translated into appropriate action -
history has confirmed the analysis accuracy. |
