The Quality Blog

I was returning a car the other day at Hertz at the Detroit airport. And lo and behold, on the wall upstairs were large poster sized examples of how to do an 8D. 8D, as you may know, is a great way to get to a root cause of a problem by working it from the Symptom to the Problem Statement using the “5 why” process. From there the statement is converted to a problem description using an IS/IS NOT analysis. The IS/IS NOT gathers facts about the what, where, when and How Big. This analysis is more about finding out what the problem is not as opposed to looking for the root cause initially.

The root cause is only agreed upon after developing theories based on the facts and the differences and changes that have taken place. Change is usually where the problem is. The fact that change takes place without proper verification and validation makes the 8D process very effective. The team does not have to be Six Sigma experts to use it effectively, but it ties in nicely with six sigma process.

I hope Hertz uses the process effectively and I wish them good luck and applaud the effort to find the root cause and fix it at that level.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 4:59 pm and is filed under 8D. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.