Effective root cause analysis: Problem nature and tools integrative approach

Abstract

Nowadays organizations face different types of problems every day and need to improve and adjust on an ongoing basis for maintaining competitiveness and business excellence. This often involves identifying root causes or other major factors that impact process performance in value chain. Extant literature has confirmed that root cause analysis (RCA) tools have individual attributes to identify the root causes. However, there is a gap in respect of identification of the relationships among different root causes such as interaction between different causes and levels of significance of each cause. Besides, ways for structured integration of RCA tools applications is also missing. This paper provides: 1) the procedure to identify the significance and relationships of root causes; 2) a framework for RCA tools application in an effective sequence to identify the root causes systematically and accurately for problems of different nature.