Are your teams not fast enough during problem solving?
Does your team struggle to deliver the kind of rapid and effective problem-solving your business requires? Can you really afford the unhappy customers, wasted engineering hours, cost of poor quality, and lost opportunities?
Teams can improve their problem solving and issue resolution cycle time with Visual 8D™ / Visual CAPA™.
THE PAIN: An issue-resolution team had wrestled with a complicated problem for 18 months without finding the root cause. It was costing millions in time wasted on inconclusive tests and unhelpful customer update meetings. It was distracting the team from new product development and cost reduction priorities. It was an expensive mess!
THE CAUSE: Although they used traditional tools like Is / Is Not, 5-Why, and Fishbone, the team lacked the structure to clarify and sequence their hypotheses – they were chasing every random idea and getting nowhere. Without strong linkage between hypothesis and test plan, they weren't defining effective tests to rule-in or rule-out ideas and establish root cause. Without the right structure they were never going to converge on a solution.
THE VISION: We needed a way to ensure both the internal and customer teams could see the connections between hypotheses and actions, the sequencing of those actions, and progress. Everyone had to understand how their activity was contributing to the determination of the root cause (or change direction if it wasn't). How could we organize the team and the work to ensure focus on key actions that drive root cause determination?
THE SOLUTION: By applying Visual 8D™ / Visual CAPA™ the root cause was found within just 3 months - saving over 75% of the cycle time to closure. Visual 8D™/Visual CAPA™ was simple to customize to the company's problem-solving paradigm and terminology. The straightforward templates guided the team through the problem-solving process while seamlessly producing easy-to-follow visual outputs that customers love.
Your company's chosen approach isn't the problem - it's how your team is executing. V8D™/V-CAPA™ facilitates internal planning, communication, and execution, allowing teams to move much faster.
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Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
Your team is marching through the tools of your company's chosen problem-solving approach. This is time not spent on growing your business or delivering cost reductions. Yet your customers are suffering, and they're not shy about letting you know it! Why isn't it working?
Negative customer experiences can destroy your business! Have you been faced with any angry customers this year? CAEDENCE's Visual 8D™ / Visual CAPA™ enhanced problem-solving toolkit was the answer. It integrates seamlessly with your existing problem-solving approach and systems.
Your primary role as a manager is to ensure your team’s success. Internalize this. Make sure your team members know this. Build an environment of trust and collaboration. A direct report of mine would frequently leave me out of the loop as problems escalated, preferring instead to “work harder”. It was clear that he felt uncomfortable delivering bad news to me (his boss) when things were not going according to plan. Let me tell you the rest of the story.
I was struggling to get updates from my regional project management directors. Sensing my frustration at having to constantly repeat my (apparently futile) requests to the team to provide their updates consistently, my boss suggested, “If you want something done, schedule it.” He meant that if updates are needed at a specific time, actually schedule them directly on people's calendars, making the expectation and reminder "automatic" each month, and emphasizing the importance of the updates by turning them into meetings – people tend not to show up empty handed to meetings where they're expected to present. Scheduling removed a bit of "friction" and created a sense of urgency that resulted in real progress. Amazingly, they didn’t miss any updates after that point!
