Many plants that are 2-3 years into the process show expenditures but no proven benefits. There are few things worse than working on an improvement system to reduce failures and improve quality only to have unwanted downtime and customer complaints continue. Some companies experience burnout and give up. Burnout may occur because of insufficient personnel, rigors of the work, discipline of the methodology, and management pressure to show a return on the investment. Under these conditions, RCFA dovetails into the process here because it alleviates management pressure by solving existing problems quickly.
Every operation has failures that occur repeatedly.
The repetition persuades employees to see these failures as part of the job instead of part of a problem. Over time, management finds itself budgeting for these recurring events as a cost of doing business. Such chronic failures represent a company s area of opportunity . Every problem solved recovers money that was lost in the past. It is a means of raising the performance bar by creating a higher status quo.