The Excellence Engine LLC has been dissolved. This website is maintained by Chester D Rowe to maintain the online material I wish to keep online.
I am still dedicated to powering your performance improvement efforts through innovative cause investigation tools (e.g. The Cause Road Map©) and services.
My mission is to make cause investigations as easy to do and as simple as possible while still providing an unmatched level of insight into the fundamental causes and causal factors of events.
A detail comparative analysis of many current Root Cause investigation methods, tools and techniques was done in 2011 by the Joint Research Centre – Institute for Energy (ISBN 978-91-79-19712-3). This analysis covered the following event investigation tools:
Event and causal factor charting and Kepner-Tregoe Problem Solving and
analysis Decision Making
Cause and effect analysis Causal factor tree analysis
Interviewing Event tree analysis
Task analysis Interrelationship diagram
Change analysis Current Reality Tree (CRT)
Barrier analysis Human Factors Investigation Tool (HFIT)
Fault tree analysis
This document also examined the following commercial ‘all’ purpose tools:
REASON® PROACT® RealityCharting® TapRooT®
This analysis concluded that “most of the available recommendations concerning selection and usage of different event investigation methods, tools and techniques are not exhaustive and user-friendly” and that “most of the available recommendations are of little practical value, leaving current and future event investigators (especially newcomers, who are not yet proficient) to make decisions about the selection of event investigation methods and tools, based on their own knowledge or providers’ promotional materials.”
This Joint Research Centre effort did not include a review of the Cause Road Map© and the unique method of classifying and integration of most of the above tools with the Cause Road Map© as described in The Excellence Engine Tool Kit (ISBN: 978-0-615-24850-9). If it had, they may have recognized that classifying the above listed tools and techniques as either Data Gathering, Data Analysis or Event Modeling (or combinations thereof) and how this insight, coupled with the structural elements of the Cause Road Map© and our unique “Comparative Event/Time Line” tool provide a framework for any cause investigation.
This JRC-IE report also provided the following graphic depiction that clearly indicates that over 56% for all events can be traced to a Latent Organizational Weakness.
Unlike most of the previously listed “commercial” tools, the Cause Road Map© not only makes it easy to identify the latent organizational weakness behind the majority of significant event but provides insights into why these weakness exited.
In conclusion, even newcomers can use our book to make good decisions about the best event investigation methods and tools to use. Our book also provides user-friendly guidance and all of the tools they will need to rapidly and accurately investigation the causes for all categories of events.