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EDITORIAL
Get to the Root Cause of Factory Failure: Ask the Five Whys
By Ira Smolowitz, Ph.D.
__________________________________________________________________________
Frederick F. Reichheld in his Harvard Business Review article, “Learning
From Customer Defections,” indicates: Getting to the root causes
of human behavior takes a lot of time, effort, and experience. In
a factory setting, where root-cause failure analysis has been perfected
over decades, the process is known as the five whys because you
usually have to ask why something happened at least five times to
get to the root of a failure. For example: Why did the product get
returned as defective?
The connector came loose.
Why did the connector come loose?
The plug was out of tolerance.
Why was the plug manufactured out of tolerance?
The intermediate stamping machine failed.
Why did the stamping machine fail? Routine maintenance wasn’t
done on schedule.
Why?
There is an attendance problem in the maintenance department.1
EMS Consulting Group references the book, The Toyota Way, by Jeffrey
Liker on their web-page. EMS Consulting Group indicates: “Toyota
identifies root causes primarily using a very simple method called
the “five whys.” Here is the essence of the example provided:
There is a puddle of oil on the shop floor.
Why? – Because the machine is leaking oil.
Why? – Because the gasket has deteriorated.
Why? – Because we bought gaskets made of inferior material.
Why? – Because we got a good deal (price) on those gaskets.
Why? – Because the purchasing agent gets evaluated on short-term
cost savings.2
The power of the five whys is obvious. To stop with the puddle on
the floor is, in my opinion, the equivalent of giving a bandage
to a patient who has hemorrhage. All the whys must be addressed
to get to the root cause of the nominal problem. In the above example,
in my opinion, a cultural mandate of cost savings has to be reviewed/assessed
on a cost/benefit basis. Asking the “fifth why” brings the root
cause of the puddle on the shop floor to the surface.
The five whys, it seems to me, traces cause-and-effect throughout
the entire organization. The following real-world example has, in
my opinion, comparable five whys manifestation.
Horst Schulze, the leader of the Ritz-Carlton Hotels, tells the
story of how a manager identified and solved a recurring problem…room
service breakfasts arriving late and cold…
The manager organized a team of his room-service employees
and asked them to study the problem, find out why the meals were
not getting to guests within a reasonable time, and suggest solutions.
The team soon found that the cause was the unavailability of the
elevators needed by the room-service people to get the meals quickly
to guests. They had a room-service employee spend an entire morning
in an elevator with a stopwatch to see where the elevators were,
what they were being used for, and why they weren’t available
when the room-service people needed them. What they found astonished
Schulze and the manager. The whole problem could be traced to
a management decision about how many bed sheets each floor was
allowed to stock for the housekeepers. The decision frequently
left some floors with too few sheets, and the housekeepers were
using the elevators to hunt for extra sheets to finish cleaning
the rooms on their floors. The elevators were therefore unavailable
to the room-service delivery people when they needed them, meals
were delivered late, and guests got angry. Because a manager trying
to save on the cost of sheets had stocked too few, the rest of
the system was disrupted. This “cost-saving” move drove up the
overall costs of room service (because the hotel did not charge
for meals when guests complained) and housekeeping labor (because
housekeepers were spending their time in elevators instead of
making beds). Trying to save money in one part of the service-delivery
system created problems for another part. The total impact was
to drive up costs and increase customer dissatisfaction. What
manager would ever have thought to solve the late-breakfast problem
by adding more bed sheets to the available supply on each floor?
Simply putting out one small fire (“we are spending too much money
on sheets”) without thinking about the entire system can cause
big problems.3
Often the hotel management fad of today becomes another management
fad of tomorrow. In my opinion, the “five whys” are so logically
compelling that I doubt if it will be eventually relegated to fad
status.
I believe that any organization, factory, hotel, hospital, etc.,
would benefit from the application of the five whys to bring the
root cause of failure to the surface.
Given its logic and applicability, it is an extremely useful problem
solving tool.
References
1. Harvard Business Review 96210, downloaded 2/8/07 from: www.profitmatters.ca/articles/HB_Customer_Defections.
PDF p. 7.
2. EMS Consulting Group – “Toyota’s Learning Organization,” downloaded
2/8/07 from: http://www.emsstrategies.com/dd080104article2.html,
p. 1.
3. Ford, Robert C., Heaton, Cherrill P., Brown, Stephen W. “Delivering
Excellent Service: Lessons From The Best Firms,” California Management
Review, vol. 44, no. 1, Fall 2001, pp 42-43.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Articles printed with the permission of Dr. Ira Smolowitz,
Professor of Finance and Dean, Bureau of Business Research and Program
Development at American International College, Springfield, MA.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Page updated: May 21, 2007 7:47 AM |
All
contents © 2007. All rights reserved.