RCA tools training exercise

Hi all,

I am developing a RCA Training program where the participants will be trained in basic QC tools. The tools included are Process flow diagram, Cause and effect diagram, The 5-why, Pareto chart, Histogram, Stratification and Scatter diagram .

The training will consists of both theory and workshops; where participants will get a chance to use sample data to learn how to use various tools. Instead of using separate problem / data for each tool. I plan to develop a 'Business case' where the trainees act as a consultant to improve a quality issue. This will allow the trainees to see how the various tools can be used together to solve a issue.

The title of business case is 'Reduce customer complains' in a Pizza shop.

At present i have the following in mind.

It start with customer interviews to gather data for quality issues. Here i plan to give a 'table of customer complains'. Then ask participants to use 'Pareto chart' to identify the biggest issue. The top issue will be 'Pizza is delivered cold'

After which I plan to give participants a 'process description' (in a word document) which the participants will use to prepare 'Process map' of pizza making and delivery process.

Once the participants have developed the process map then I ask them to prepare a 'Cause and effect diagram' to brainstorm ALL the causes of 'Why pizza is delivered cold'.

One of the prefilled cause in the cause-and-effect diagram will be 'Delivery time' so the longer the delivery time the more likelihood that pizza will be delivered cold.

The participants will then use the 'Five why' tools to further dig down and find the root cause of the 'Delivery time'. And I expect that one of the 'Why' could be 'Distance to customer' or 'Mode of delivery'

Then, I plan to give them 'Delivery time' of last 100 pizza deliveries. The participant will be asked to use this data to prepare a 'Histogram' of the data.

Once the histogram is prepared the participant will see a wide spread in delivery time.

I then ask the participants to use 'Stratification' tool to separate the delivery time into three different 'Modes of delivery' i.e (by cycle, moped and car).

The Stratification chart will show that deliveries made by Car and Cycle have the biggest delivery time and hence cold pizza.

Next task is to prepare a 'Scatter diagram' of 'Distance to customer vs Delivery time'. The result will show that for longer distance car is better and for shorter distance cycle is better.

The above exercises should allow the participants to learn how the output of one tool can be used as an input for other tool.


I would like to know if anyone has attempted a similar trainings before and can share their experience. Also how I can improve these exercises? Any comments will be appreciated.

I have attached a flow down of the exercises.

Thanks

Why use pizza instead of real-world issues in your company?

An exercise I did quite a bit on the job and at face to face college classes was the "tinkertoy exercise" from the old Deming Electronic Network contributed by Robert Crow. There are quite a few lessons from the exercise, and it does lend itself to a RCA after the exercise is completed.

Jim Wynne said:

Why use pizza instead of real-world issues in your company?

Click to expand...

The reason for using a generic pizza example is that the training participants come from various parts of the organizations, some are electronic engineers, other are composite engineers, others are from supply chain and procurement, project managers and so on. And we have a very diversified product portfolio and using a specific problem may not be easy to understand for all the participants. However i do plan to add real historical examples to show how cause-and-effect diagram was used in previous projects but not as a workshop.

Steve Prevette said:

An exercise I did quite a bit on the job and at face to face college classes was the "tinkertoy exercise" from the old Deming Electronic Network contributed by Robert Crow. There are quite a few lessons from the exercise, and it does lend itself to a RCA after the exercise is completed.

Click to expand...

Thanks Steve, The Tinkertoy exercise looks interesting and can be used as a generic exercise for team building but i fail to understand its usage to teach basic QC tools.

For basic QC tools - there is the basic issue that Dr. Deming focused upon which was competition vs cooperation. Why does every group of people given the execise hoard their resources and assume it is a competition? How many VP's in your corporation compete with each other versus cooperate for optimization of the whole? Also, there is the RCA features of the post job - what was the effect of management decisions on the task, the impact of some of the broken tinker toys? It is interesting in one exercise a team took their broken tinkertory pieces, put them in the "opponents" supply and picked up replacement good pieces from their supply? How about the effect of not being able to communicate at the last minute? How does communication affect a project? Usually groups lay out their parts ready to go - what was the effect of the change of plan to put the parts back in the can?

@Tahirawan77, if you are still in favor of your pizza idea, I always liked the programs at Agile42.com. Their focus is more on Lean thinking and Kaizan methods, but there is a quality angle as well because a portion of the "pizzas" are made non-conforming and have to be remade. I suggest rather than externally impose a problem statement [that pizza is delivered cold], simply define the quality problem as the need to boost productivity in a cutthroat industry, and turn the students loose to choose their next course of action. I think this pizza exercise readily leads to instinctive use of Problem Definition, RCA and other Quality Tools, rather than forced problem-solving. The benefit of a simulation exercise over a canned problem you define, is the students solve a problem they experience live (in simulation), rather than "cold pizza" which might mean different things to different people.

I personally am an advocate for artificial competition in classroom exercises as a great motivator, although I acknowledge the point from @Steve Prevette that IRL competition sometimes blinds people to other solutions.

Referencing the license agreement:
"This work is distributed free of charge under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and it is the intellectual property of agile42 International GmbH. Shortly means you can use it for free, you can’t resell it and you are required to share any further modification with the same license format."

@John Predmore , Thanks for you comments. And yes I am still in favor of pizza idea. The Agile42 Pizza game is a good way to use games to teach various principals. I wonder if anyone has ever used similar games/simulation to teach the basic RCA tools.

Regarding my RCA training workshop, the original motivation for this training is to show the participants how the various quality tools can be use together to solve a issue. My concern is that if I do not use a 'forced solution' and the participants come one with only potential cause(s) for which I do not have any data available in advance then it will not be possible to use the all the RCA tools. For e.g in order to ensure I can use the histogram, scatter plot during workshop, I need to ensure some of the potential causes allow use to use variable data and if the trainees come with no potential cause where variable data can be collected then it would not be possible to use Histogram and scatter plot during the training workshops and hence cannot use all the tools during workshop.

i have also learned from my previous teaching experiences that during training the trainees really want to see the end result as a 'success' otherwise they have low confidence in using the tools in real life.