7 CHALLENGES

TO IMPLEMENTING
ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS
ENTERPRISE-WIDE
And How to Overcome Them
 INTRODUCTION
Have you noticed that even the greatest super heroes have a
sidekick? That’s because no matter how skilled and powerful we
are we can always accomplish more when we have help. You
might have noticed this in your work. Even if you’re at the top
of your game and putting everything you have into running the
best possible root cause analysis program, you’re going to face
setbacks – both major and minor – unless you have the right tools
and support. And the larger and more complex your organization,
the larger and more complex your problems become. Here we’ve
called out some of the most common challenges to running a
successful root cause analysis (RCA) program across mutliple sites
or departments within an organization. We’ll conclude with our best
advice for overcoming these obstacles.

7 Challenges to Implementing RCA Enterprise-wide - And How to Overcome Them Page 2

 CHALLENGE #1
THERE IS NO VISUAL
CAUSE-AND-EFFECT
CHART OF YOUR ANALYSIS,
and it is too time-consuming to create one.
There is a common abbreviation that was born on
the internet – TLDR. It stands for “too long; didn’t
read.” In this age of short news cycles and even
shorter attention spans, many folks don’t have
the patience to read past the headlines. Perhaps
you’ve encountered this in your work, too. You
spend weeks on your Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
investigation, you spend hours meticulously writing
up your findings in a 10-page summary, you hand it
off to management, eager to share your learnings,
and then… crickets. You’ve been a victim of TLDR.
RCA investigations can become difficult to follow
without the use of a visual tool such as a cause-
and-effect chart. A visual representation of your
causes and effects can accomplish in a single page
what might otherwise have taken pages of text to
explain. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a
7 Challenges to Implementing RCA Enterprise-wide - And How to Overcome Them
thousand words. It’s much easier to understand and
retain information when you have a picture to help
get the story across.
Perhaps you’ve realized that a chart will greatly
help communicate the discoveries from your RCA
investigation, and you’re all set to build one. Visio
and Excel are probably the most commonly used
tools for this, but they require starting from scratch
and can be cumbersome. It is a pain to draw boxes,
move them, draw lines between them, and try to
make it all look halfway presentable. These tools
simply weren’t built with cause-and-effect chart
creation in mind as a primary function. The end result
can often be very useful, but the time you need
to invest is considerable, especially if you’re not
already skilled in building charts with this software.
Page 3
 CHALLENGE #2
ACTION ITEMS LACK
ACCOUNTABILITY AND
OFTEN GO UNDONE.
Most likely you come out of your RCA investigation Even when the Excel file has been carefully kept
with a list of action items that various people are up-to-date, it often lives locally on the manager’s
responsible for. Then everyone goes about their hard drive, and other members of the team don’t
regular workdays and may or may not remember have any visibility as to what has and hasn’t
to follow through on any additional tasks they been done.
were assigned. Even if you have an appointed
person to follow up with the action items and
make sure they’re on track, it can be difficult to
keep up with who’s done what. Many managers
rely on an Excel spreadsheet to manually track
what has and hasn’t been done, due dates, and
so forth. But this puts a lot of pressure on one
person to keep up with everything – to manually
send reminders to folks who haven’t completed
their tasks and to enter the information properly
when it has been done.

7 Challenges to Implementing RCA Enterprise-wide - And How to Overcome Them Page 4

 CHALLENGE #3
TEAM MEMBERS DON’T KNOW
WHERE TO STORE OR FIND
FILES, AND THEY GET LOST.
It isn’t just action tracking spreadsheets that get
stuck on one individual’s computer desktop,
never to be seen again. Often RCA investigations
result in evidence files, charts, summaries and
other documents that don’t have a central home
where multiple members of an organization
can access them. If something happens to that
individual’s computer, or if that person leaves
the company, no one else will know where
to find their documents. With a rapidly aging
workforce and skilled, experienced employees
fast approaching retirement, many companies
are in danger of losing decades of institutional
knowledge along with those workers if they don’t
find another way to capture it.

7 Challenges to Implementing RCA Enterprise-wide - And How to Overcome Them Page 5

 CHALLENGE #4
COMPANIES ARE CONTINUALLY
REINVENTING THE WHEEL
- performing the same RCA multiple times for similar incidents.

Even some of the most successful Fortune 500 solve it themselves. They could save themselves
companies are plagued by communication a lot of effort and money if the discoveries made in
challenges between their various sites and Texas had been shared across all sites.
departments. This can cause problems in many
different areas, not the least of which are their
RCA investigations. Without a good flow of
communication and knowledge-sharing between
sites, learnings from an RCA can’t be put to their
best use.

For example, an oil & gas company might have

a problem with a pump at a site in Texas. After
performing an RCA investigation, they discover
the issue and are able to fix it and get the pump
back up and running. Several months later, one of
the company’s sites in Oklahoma encounters the
same pump issue. If the team in Oklahoma doesn’t
know that this issue was already solved in Texas,
they will invest time and resources attempting to
Or what if the pump issue repeats itself, but it’s
several years after the first incident and none
of the team members who solved the issue the
first time are with the company anymore? That
institutional knowledge often goes away when
employees move on or retire.

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 CHALLENGE #5
RCA LEADERS HAVE NO
GOOD WAY TO TRACK AND
SHARE THEIR SUCCESS.
If you are in charge of RCA at your company, it’s
in your best interest to show concrete evidence
of the success of your RCA program. But it can be
unwieldy and time-consuming to manually go back
and calculate the results of your investigations each
month – how many investigations were performed?
What were the discoveries? How many corrective
actions have been taken? What is the ROI on your
program?

This tracking and reporting is an important step

in proving your value, but it can easily fall by the
wayside when you are doing it all manually and
the investigations themselves are taking up most
of your time. Being able to demonstrate your RCA
program’s ROI becomes especially important at
performance review time. If management isn’t
being shown the value of the RCA program, they
may not think it’s worth keeping around.

7 Challenges to Implementing RCA Enterprise-wide - And How to Overcome Them Page 7

 CHALLENGE #6
THERE IS NO VISIBILITY INTO THE
BIGGEST PROBLEM AREAS, SO THE
WRONG ISSUES GET PRIORITIZED.
Even the world’s best, most diligent RCA
practitioner has the unfortunate setback of being
human. You might be executing RCAs thoroughly
and efficiently and coming up with highly effective
solutions, but much of the data you collect could
be going to waste if there is no comprehensive
way to capture it all.
Without a searchable database of your RCAs,
it can be difficult to decipher trends across the
events you are investigating. As a result, you
could be missing your biggest problem areas
and prioritizing the wrong squeaky wheels. This
means that despite your best efforts, the same
issues are going to keep recurring.
7 Challenges to Implementing RCA Enterprise-wide - And How to Overcome Them
Along the same lines, you might have your RCA
information input into some type of database, but
if that system isn’t linked to your CMMS, safety,
or other systems, there are probably important
details getting lost between the cracks. It can be
very hard to drive continuous improvement and
know where all your problems lie if your systems
aren’t talking to each other. For example, if 80
percent of your events are related to rotating
equipment but you don’t have the visibility
to realize it, the overall state of affairs of your
operation suffers greatly.
Page 8
 CHALLENGE #7
MAINTAINING MULTIPLE
SOFTWARE TOOLS OR SYSTEMS
REQUIRES TOO MUCH I.T. SUPPORT
Companies today, both large and small, rely
on various software tools to help them track
maintenance data, equipment performance,
safety incidents, and manage investigations and
action items. But this can become a drain on
the IT department as they attempt to manage
individual licenses on many different software
systems. They encounter issues with licenses
expiring at different times, having to manually
update versions for each individual, licenses
that aren’t transferrable should someone leave
the company, and various other headaches.
The software that was meant to be a time-saver
ends up costing much more time to manage
than anyone anticipated, and the IT department
gets grumpy.

7 Challenges to Implementing RCA Enterprise-wide - And How to Overcome Them Page 9

 Visual cause- Learn from
and-effect and leverage
charts of previous
your analysis RCAs
Central home
for storing and
accessing files CONCLUSION
These RCA issues have one thing in common – they
can be greatly alleviated or solved altogether with the
Track and implementation of an enterprise Root Cause Analysis
share RCA
Accountability
ENTERPRISE success
investigation software solution. When everything
and tracking
of actions SOFTWARE from evidence files to reports to action items are all
items
SOLUTION gathered and organized in one place that’s accessible
across all sites, it makes it much easier to manage.
Additionally, all stakeholders have the visibility to find
information and to see what other team members are
doing. Greater visibility eliminates a lot of unnecessary
Minimal to zero Identify trends
duplication, helps solve problems more quickly, and
I.T. support
required
across the events lets managers more easily demonstrate the value of
being investigated
to prioritize issues their RCA program.

7 Challenges to Implementing RCA Enterprise-wide - And How to Overcome Them Page 10

 RC PRO™ CAN HELP

RC Pro™ is a web-based software that was designed to make your company’s

RC YOU
PRO™ RCA program easier to manage and more visible across your entire enterprise.
It’s the RCA practitioner’s ultimate sidekick. It specifically addresses the seven
challenges described in this eBook through:

1. Report generation. 4. Classify problems. 6. Programmable interface.

RC Pro™ seamlessly builds reports
populated with data from your
investigations, including charts, graphs,
tables, and interactive KPI reports.
2. Corrective action tracking.
Email alerts and manager reports keep
everyone on task.
Classification and tagging of files lets
you easily search across investigations,
identify trends and systemic issues, and
find solutions more quickly.
5. ROI snapshot.
RC Pro™ can help managers produce
reports showing the ROI of their
RC Pro™’s API allows for integration
with other software systems, so your
CMMS, safety, and other systems are
exchanging information and you’re not
duplicating efforts or losing data.
7. Software as a Service (SaaS) option.
Users access the software via web

3. Secure file storage.
Central, cloud-based or client server-
based storage keeps all the files vital to
an investigation safe – reports, reference
files, and evidence files such as photos
and equipment data.
investigations and overall program, browser, and little to no IT support is
giving visibility into investigations required from your organization.
that have been performed as well as
corrective actions.

7 Challenges to Implementing RCA Enterprise-wide - And How to Overcome Them Page 11

 Interested in learning more about how an enterprise
software solution could benefit your company?

REQUEST A 20-MINUTE
DEMO OF RC PRO™

ARMS Reliability is an authorized global training provider of the Apollo Root Cause Analysis™ methodology. RealityCharting® and RC Pro™ are the software tools that support the Apollo Root Cause Analysis Method.