What to do when your CTQs (critical-to-quality characteristics) turn into WTFs (what-the-flig): a guide to root cause analysis and corrective action

Lance B. Coleman

doi:10.1117/12.2199882

9 September 2015 What to do when your CTQs (critical-to-quality characteristics) turn into WTFs (what-the-flig): a guide to root cause analysis and corrective action

Lance B. Coleman

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 9583, An Optical Believe It or Not: Key Lessons Learned IV; 958308 (2015) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2199882
Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2015, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

So what do you do when something has gone unexpectedly wrong with the process that you are monitoring or when your current state falls for short of desired state? Often the response is to call together the team, “huddle up”, brainstorm and come up with a solution pulled from “tribal knowledge”. There may also be some trial-and-error or one-factor-at-a-time experimentation to confirm conclusions. Truth be told that is all that is needed probably 80% of the time in many environments. What do you do however, when the event under study is complex and falls into that 20% bucket. In times like this taking the aforementioned unstructured approach would likely fail to discover the information needed or worse yet, may lead the team to draw a wrong conclusion. ? Now would be the time that a structured root cause analysis and corrective action process should be deployed. This paper will discuss three root cause analysis tools that can be used in situations of varying complexity. It will also discuss the corrective action process and pitfalls to avoid.

Citation Download Citation

Lance B. Coleman "What to do when your CTQs (critical-to-quality characteristics) turn into WTFs (what-the-flig): a guide to root cause analysis and corrective action", Proc. SPIE 9583, An Optical Believe It or Not: Key Lessons Learned IV, 958308 (9 September 2015); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2199882

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