When people think about root cause analysis (RCA), the first thought that comes to mind is often incidents and figuring out why they happened, so you can prevent them from happening again.\u00a0 While diagnosing the cause of incidents is one of the things that root cause analysis can be used for, it is also tool that can be used in much more proactive ways as well. Continuous improvement is not just about fixing things after they have broken – \u00a0it’s about assessing the things you do every day to make your operations better.<\/p>\n
Every asset or system that you have is designed and configured to operate in a specific way and to serve an intended purpose.\u00a0 Your company depends on these assets being reliable and stable with predictable performance for business processes, end-user activities and manufacturing operations to run smoothly. Whether you’re talking about your IT systems or the machines that underlie your manufacturing processes, Improving the operational stability and reliability of your assets is key to improving business performance.<\/p>\n
In the IT world, this is referred to as proactive problem management or using monitoring information combined with trend analysis to predict the types of events that are likely to occur and their projected impact, so you can make informed decisions about preemptively addressing the underlying issues to reduce the likelihood of occurrence.\u00a0 In manufacturing operations, methodologies like six-sigma include looking at trend analysis, operational variation and the use of control limits to identify when a process is performing abnormally so corrective measures can be taken.<\/p>\n
Capturing a complete picture of your asset\u2019s performance through telemetry and monitoring is only the first step.\u00a0 Root cause analysis is where this raw data is organized, contextualized, analyzed and interpreted to distill out meaningful and actionable insights that can be used to improve operational performance.\u00a0 There are two performance dimensions that your proactive root cause analysis efforts should focus on:<\/p>\n