Lessons Learned System Uses

New Capabilities and Uses for Lessons Learned

In every function of your organization, in every planning and process design activity within your organization, and in every operations improvement project within your organization, the REASON Lessons Learned capabilities can directly and significantly upgrade your expectations for success through improved efficiency and effectiveness and through reduced risk of loss in your operations.

Lessons Learned At the Corporate Level Executive managers set corporate goals and devise strategies to achieve those goals. They need to know how well the strategies are working through some other mechanism than an after-the-fact report of results . . . when it is too late to make course corrections. The REASON Lessons Learned System provides visibility of the effectiveness of strategies through a view of the policies and procedures that are generating and permitting counter-quality in the organization. Strategies are established and supported through the policies of the organization; so a simple linkage between the problem events and the policies intended to control the process provides a unique and real-time view of the business processes that are producing problems within the organization and the degree to which corporate strategies are being impaired. With REASON it is possible to monitor, measure and compare divisions, facilities, processes, management, supervision, departments and even work shifts in the effectiveness of controlling operations. With REASON data it is possible to learn how the effects of business processes are interacting within the corporate structure to generate problems. With that capability comes the ability to see how corporate policies can be improved to plug gaps in control and to generally upgrade the effectiveness of business processes throughout the corporation.

Lessons Learned for Supervisors Within your organization there may be several operations that share processes. Every day there will be supervisors who will encounter and resolve problems in some of those operations. When counter-quality events are at a level that impact production schedules or product quality or operations safety, someone will investigate and report the events. With REASON Lessons Learned System, the information on the problem and the solutions is immediately and automatically communicated to key persons who share similar job responsibilities and who can take prompt steps to head of similar problems in their area.

When a supervisor learns that a new process will be placed under his authority, the REASON Lessons Learned System can fill a role in helping to inform him of the quality and safety considerations involved. A quick search of the lessons learned data will enable him to know the kinds of problems the process has produced in the past and the best solutions to avoid recurrence. More that a mere words search, the REASON System finds situations where factors combined to produce a step toward a past problem.

For Supervisors, the REASON Lessons Learned System is a rich source of materials for production, quality and safety meetings with their personnel to pass along the special job savvy gained by others in the past.

Engineering and Planning Lessons Learned Applications Planning and design is a process that involves matching operations goals with the right facilities, equipment and processes. But often the most successful design is the one that has been designed to accommodate and capitalize upon the personnel factors that are involved in the interface between people and the environment. Here is where REASON Lessons Learned can play a big role in engineering. The Lessons Learned data enables planners to know how and why problems have occurred in the past related to similar operations in their organization.

The unique REASON data is an exact record of all of the things that either generated or permitted factors in the environment to combine and interact to produce a problem. It is in effect a map of what happened. The Lessons Learned data can be a quick and convenient tool to examine activities in order to pinpoint the steps in the process that can serve as engineering opportunities to alter the equipment, layout or production sequence in order to eliminate potential avenues to problems.

Lessons Learned in Maintenance and Production Each data entry into the REASON Lessons Learned System is a step by step record of what factors came together in a cause and effect sequence to produce a counter-quality event. From a maintenance and production perspective, it is all of the things that interfered with producing a quality product or service. This resource serves as an effective tool for study of how things are being done in the operation and what factors can serve as alerts to the existence of developing problems. Maintenance professionals can develop operations preventative maintenance check sheets to check for early warning signs of equipment problems. Production can develop operations check lists and production meeting alerts to focus upon early alert performance indicators that will aid in heading off developing problems.

Lessons Learned in Risk Assessment Conventional risk management is predicated upon noting the incidence of events associated with processes and environments and drawing conclusions regarding the likelihood of occurrence. The REASON System significantly supplements conventional risk management capability by providing a new practical tool to aid those who must assess and manage risk. REASON data hold every detail causally involved in all counter-quality issues and problems that have occurred in your organization. The system objectively quantifies the factors in relationship to their causal role in contributing to a counter-quality event and associates the event to the business process that generated the problem. Thus it is possible to trend the actual existing dynamics of control over particular operations currently in place in your organization. This view is in relationship to your existing business processes, so quick assessment of your ability to internally control the operation in question can be made in order to decide about establishing improved controls or insuring the risk or outsourcing to eliminate the risk

Lessons Learned Benefit Rank and File In your work force are savvy professionals and tradesmen who have encountered problems on their jobs and who have devised special ways of improving both their skills and the quality of their work. Across the aisle or across the continent or across the globe are other professionals who routinely wrestle with the same problem, but do not have the benefit of the savvy professional’s clever solution. The reason that they do not have that benefit is because there is no practical mechanism in the operation to gather such knowledge and broadcast it to the proper persons. REASON Lessons Learned has a built in wizard in its FrontLine Mode that enables line personnel to record the problem and its solution in just minutes. Once the data gets into the system, REASON matches the kinds of information with individual needs in order to target the knowledge for the individuals who need the data to deal with similar problems. An automatic alert is sent to the targeted persons and in seconds they can be accessing details that will enable them to benefit from the solution. This capability is a powerful and tangible tool for empowering personnel to play a significant role in your operations improvement program.

Lessons Learned Trending and Analysis Traditional approaches to trending record, count and compare incidence. It requires you to decide ahead of time what facts you want to capture so that you can monitor and trend the occurrence of those facts. REASON trending capability goes beyond keeping tabs on details that have already been recognized as important. REASON Lessons Learned is a dynamic, real-time tool for trending and strategic planning. For example, let us say that this morning you personally recognized a relationship in a loss problem that was potentially bottom line impacting. You realized that the manner in which Purchasing handled “equal to or better than” substitution of a product had combined with the way in which Maintenance was handling work orders to produce a situation that could have resulted in a major loss. Even though you had not previously considered the need to view this relationship, and had not designed your data system to record and trend such data, today you are interested to find out if this pattern had occurred anytime in the past. With REASON Lessons Learned, it is possible to key to those elements in order to find and trend any such occurrences. REASON is a mining tool for finding and accessing new knowledge about counter-quality in your organization.

For more information on ways to put REASON Lessons Learned to work for your organization, please call (903) 236-9973