Six Sigma The 5 Whys Meeting #3

Today we isolated processes where failures where likely to occur and asked ourselves why the problems occurred—5 times.

There is no magic in the number five, it’s really just about identifying root causes of problems, of getting past the superficially causes.

For example, let’s say that there is a problem with the amount of time a customer has to wait to get through a telephone representative at a company during lunch hours. Let’s ask ourselves WHY?

1) WHY? Because most telephone representatives are out to lunch and the call-center is understaffed at this particular time of day.

2) WHY? The call-center is understaffed at this particular time of day because the Shift Supervisor has not created a flexible schedule.

3) WHY? The Shift Supervisor has not created a flexible schedule because upper management has not asked him to.

4) WHY? Managers have not told to create a flexible schedule to accommodate for lunch-hours because the company has not trained them to ask this of their Shift Supervisors.

The root cause of this problem is that upper management has not received the proper training. Of course you could take it a step further and say that it is not in the company’s culture of doing things.