What is Root Cause Analysis (RCA)?

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a method that helps you do an objective and sytematic search for underlying causes of an incident or quality problem. RCA does NOT address liability. Its premiss is that an incident is the undesired unintended outcome for all involved. The goal is to learn and improve.

Why use Root Cause Analysis (RCA)?

Unfortunately there is no better motive to improve and change than a hard confrontation with a complaint, quality problem or safety incident. The more the impact, the more everyone feels the urgency.

The important advantages of Root Cause Analysis (RCA):

• RCA does not stop with the causes closest to the incident. It looks for underlying organisational, technical and human causes.
• RCA does not try to find someone to blame. Do you employ criminals and saboteurs? When undelying causes are not addressed, it will go wrong again with other people involved.
• No method and structure during investigation and analysis leads to a questionable diagnosis. RCA provides structure and techniques to make the causation visible, indisputable and persuasive.
• You do not want to be the only one that understands what caused the problem. RCA results are persuasive, because the structure of the problem is proven by logic and easily understandable.
• RCA is not limited to large (costly) problems. The intensity of the RCA scales up and down with the magnitude of the problem.
• RCA can be applied to safety incidents, customer complaints or quality problems about products, machines, process installations, customer service, software, projects, health care and many more.

Root Cause Analysis is a powerful and proven method that is invaluable to continuous safety and quality improvement.