Root cause analysis is an important problem-solving tool that enables food manufacturers to investigate the underlying causes of potential food safety management issues and put in place permanent solutions that prevent them from reoccurring.
It has a number of benefits, including driving continuous improvement in food safety management, avoiding the costs of product recalls and reoccurring issues, reducing customer complaints, and protecting brand reputation.
The concept of root cause analysis was first used in car manufacturing, but it has since been used in many manufacturing environments as a problem-solving tool. In recent years, regulators and food certification schemes such as BRCGS have included the need for root cause analysis in their standards, meaning the tool is now widely adopted in the food industry.
There are many circumstances when root cause analysis should be carried out in a food manufacturing business, including when internal or external audits have identified non-conformities i.e. something that isn’t right, after a product recall or when there has been an upward trend in customer complaints.
Root cause analysis is a fundamental part of the preventive and corrective action process following an identified ‘issue’. This includes a series of reactive and proactive measures taken following completion of immediate corrective action and a thorough investigation, to ensure a food safety issue doesn’t happen again in the future.
BRCGS have identified five key steps for conducting effective preventive action. They are as follows:
- Define the non-conformity – You must be clear from the start what the issue being investigated is and what it is not.If you aren’t then you could waste a lot of time and effort. Be specific and precise – think about the what, where, when, frequency and quantity of the problem you’re investigating.
- Investigate the root cause – The next step to conducting effective preventive action is to investigate the root cause of the problem. Effectively, this step tries to get to the bottom of what system or process failed so this problem was able to occur. There are a number of different systematic approaches you can use, including the “Five Whys” method, which requires you to keep asking ‘why’ until you get to the root cause of a problem. The fish bone method, which is useful for more complex problems, helps teams organise potential causes of a problem into categories that resemble a fish’s skeleton.
- Create a preventive action plan – Once you’ve identified the root causes of your non-conformances, you need to put in place actions to prevent them from reoccurring. You should create a plan that includes the preventive actions (broken down into stages), who is responsible for them, target completion dates, a project plan, and costs. Ensure that your actions are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-based.
- Implement the action plan – Now you’ve got a preventive action plan, it’s time to implement it. To ensure your team is set up to succeed, it’s important to get buy in from senior management, brief all the stakeholders who are involved in its implementation and build its execution into everyone’s daily responsibilities. Secondly, it’s important to monitor progress against key milestones and communicate how things are going to everyone involved.
- Verification and monitoring effectiveness – The final step is the one that’s often left out, verifying and monitoring the effectiveness of your preventive actions. It’s really important to make sure that the actions you have implemented have been effective, that you have discovered the ‘real’ root cause of the problem and that you haven’t inadvertently introduced any additional issues. Depending on the problem, you can verify this through audits, customer complaints and/or trend data e.g. microbiological etc.
It can be difficult to put the theory of root cause analysis into practice if you haven’t carried it out before, with common mistakes including simply duplicating immediate corrective actions, involving the wrong people in the process, and failing to identify all the root causes of a problem.
Through the Welsh Government’s HELIX Programme, ZERO2FIVE can support companies to implement effective root cause analysis. To find out more about how we can help, please get in touch.
We also run a series of food security workshops, one of which focuses on the topic of root cause analysis. To find out more about these training opportunities, visit here.
