Continual Improvement is at the heart of ISO Management, a large part of which is dedicated to ensuring issues don't reoccur. This is more than just putting a plaster on it and calling it a day, it's about finding the root cause.

This not only eliminates wasted time, effort and money with firefighting repeated mistakes, but also drives meaningful improvement. Over the years, many techniques have been developed to help with finding cause.

In this episode, Ian Battersby explores the need to find the root cause of issues in ISO Management and explains some key techniques for root cause analysis that you can put into practice to help stop recurring issues.  

You'll learn

·      What is meant by 'finding cause'?

·      Why do you need to find the cause?

·      Where is finding cause specified in ISO Standards?

·      Finding cause in practice

·      What are the 5 Why's?

·      What is the fish bone / Ishikawa?

·      What is FMEA?

·      What is fault tree analysis?

·      How do these techniques work in practice?

 

Resources

·      Isologyhub

 

In this episode, we talk about:

[02:05 ] Episode Summary – Ian dives into finding cause within ISO Management, explaining various techniques to help you prevent recurring issues.

[03:15 ] What is meant by 'Finding cause'? When an output from a process is not what was expected, then it is classed as a non-conformity which will need to be addressed through corrective action.

Before you can put that action into place, you need to identify the root cause for the issue. It's about putting right what went wrong.

[04:00 ] Why do you need to find cause? Ian gives an example of a reactive response to resolving an issue, it didn't get to the root of why the mistake happened in the first place.  

Finding cause is necessary to stop issues from repeating, rather than simply firefighting issues as they occur.

ISO terminology has updated to reflect this over the years. There used to be a term called 'Preventive action', but this has since been changed to 'Corrective action' following on from the 2015 Annex SL update to many ISO Standards. This reflects the new risk-based approach to ISO management.

The terms are largely the same in nature, but preventive action was widely misunderstood and so this was renamed and clarified following 2015.

[05:55 ] Where is finding cause specified in ISO Standards? As with many aspects of ISO, the need for finding cause can be found in a few places within a Standard, including: -

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