Introducing the Visual 8D™
Communicating effectively is important at all times in business, but perhaps never more so than during issue resolution. When quality problems intensify, the customer applies pressure, management gets upset, and emotions run high. Quality and business leaders need to solve problems faster and improve their customers' experience.
Commonly used in industry, structured problem-solving methods (e.g., 8D, DMAIC, PDCA, etc.) provide structure to drive activity during issue resolution, but the traditional toolkits have a glaring gap – they fail to facilitate clear and timely communication of the critical information needed to maintain customer confidence throughout a crisis.
CAEDENCE has developed a novel improvement to overcome the communication-based shortfalls in existing methods. Applicable to all structured problem-solving approaches, Visual 8D™ enables teams to execute the familiar problem-solving steps (with no additional effort), while capturing plans and progress in easy-to-follow diagrams. Visual 8D™ puts teams in the position of providing answers to management and customer questions before being asked, resulting in improved control of the situation and minimizing time wasted on extraneous actions.
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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?
