A Single Why to Multiple Why’s – Finding the True Causes & Hidden Roots for Continuous Improvement of Your Quality & Safety Processes

Relying on a manual RCA process complicates the collaboration between the cross-functional teams needed for a successful RCA. It also makes documentation much more challenging, requires someone to manually document the data and input findings from the 5Why analysis. It also increases the risk of mistakes and miscommunication between team members, which can jeopardize the quality of the investigation. Not to mention, the implementation, documentation and follow up of corrective or preventative actions become difficult.

A 5Why method that is digitally integrated into your organization’s Quality Management System can significantly increase the effectiveness of your RCAs. It helps global teams collaborate and get to the root cause of a quality issue, then easily record and assign corrective actions to the right people in real-time. It is essential to determine and initiate a corrective and preventive action whenever the root cause has been assessed and concluded because corrective actions can be reviewed as a part of the overall investigation. By doing so, we are assuring that the root cause that has been concluded remains relevant and unchanged.

Another important aspect of Root Cause Analysis is how to leverage all collected data to go beyond the immediately investigated problem and identify systemic issues and opportunities to improve. The ability to easily classify root causes using a nomenclature that makes sense to an organization is essential to help quality professionals to think critically about where the most significant opportunities are to improve. It enables a proactive approach to identifying and solving systemic issues that are affecting your customers, profitability, products, services, and processes.

In this whitepaper, we talk about:

• The origin of 5Why method
• Quality and regulatory perspective
• How a digitalized 5Why can help
• And more