Lessons Learned System Vendor

REASON ® Lessons Learned: A New Paradigm

Alliance Lessons Learned

To generate quality in today’s world, organizations, suppliers, vendors and customers have to work more closely together than ever before. REASON® Lessons Learned is a solution that meets the needs of these organizations by providing a means for uniting within an alliance of common problem solving language, thinking, solution sharing, process, and toolset.

A parts vendor does not meet a delivery commitment on a parts order. As a result, its defense contractor client cannot meet critical production schedules. As a result, contract commitments to their customer cannot be met by the client. As a result, penalties fall into place and pending new contract negotiations are cancelled. Negative impacts ripple back and forth throughout the linkages among the end customer, the product manufacturer and the parts vendor. Each feels the pain and typically sets about to get to the bottom of its respective problems. It is a story theme as old as commerce itself - but especially true in today’s world.

Your problems are my problems

Most operations problems are not crises, and usually not traumas; yet the dynamics of inter-company problems present unique challenges to many businesses. For example, a large, global chemical products corporation might depend upon hundreds of different transportation and shipping vendors for its raw materials, process chemicals, and equipment, as-well-as for the conveyance of its products to distributors and customers. On any one day the organization can expect there to be delayed shipments, misdelivered or lost shipments, damaged packages and so forth. There will be complaints, apologies, and sincere efforts to improve; but with only marginal overall benefit to the global corporation because each instance is individually dealt with by one of the hundreds of vendors using different problem solving approaches and with no system in place to communicate and share information and solutions. Taken as a whole in this example, the day-to-day obstacles take a toll on profits, product and service quality, customer satisfaction, and vendor relationships. This dilemma may seem inevitable, but REASON Alliance Lessons Learned is a corporate solution that promises to get a handle on this pervasive loss exposure.

Repeatable Process and Communications Linkage

Traditionally, in global corporations it is common for solutions to be known in one location, but not known to the people who need that solution elsewhere in the organizational structure - or in a vendor supplier elsewhere in the world. This lack of effective communications costs global companies millions in repeated problems each year. REASON solves this issue by providing a superior targeting and communication mechanism for solutions that creates better and more powerful communication connections between the people with special knowledge and the people who need it around the organization.

REASON technology makes alliance problem solving a realistic and practical corporate solution. It is a standardized, repeatable process for solving problems and an advanced lessons learned communications system, providing the critical elements that produce a common language of unified data for dealing with problems from multiple locations and a communications capability that automatically places information directly into the hands of the persons throughout the network of organizations who can use it to head off developing problems in their area.

Let us say that in one of your vendor’s facilities this morning a problem occurred that will impact your organization. A REASON analysis was conducted, and a solution action has been set in motion. When the analysis was completed earlier this morning, the knowledge that was learned about the problem flowed automatically into your REASON Alliance Lessons Learned System. Previously, individuals throughout your network of vendors, suppliers and customers had submitted a unique profile of the issues and concerns that were important to their job responsibilities and functions. As the data from the problem of this morning flowed into the system, REASON was watching for matches between the facts of the current problem and the key issues in those individual data profiles. When a match was found, REASON immediately sent an alert with a brief summary of the problem to the appropriate individuals. In minutes, those individuals were accessing the full details within the system. Thus, you and your vendors got an instant heads-up. Vital knowledge about the problem, its causes and solutions got into the hands of just those individuals who needed the data most, and who can do something to deal with the potential of a developing or existing problem in their organizations. The data also serves as a knowledge resource for issues that mutually affect the member organizations, and can be accessed throughout the network in order to get the immediate information that can help avoid the repeat of someone else’s past mistake.

Termed ‘Targeted Push and Pull’ Lessons Learned, because data are instantly pushed out into the field in a logically targeted way to the appropriate persons and can be quickly and efficiently pulled from the system, REASON is the problem solving and lessons learned system pioneered by Decision Systems, Inc. and currently deployed within our country’s space program, as well as within other world class organizations globally. This off-of-the-shelf technology and software system is the one-system answer to upgrading your organization’s operations improvement capabilities. With REASON’s Alliance Lesson Learned, you can more cost-effectively resolve operations issues, raise your goals higher and provide a stronger growth path for future quality improvement strategies than is possible with any other quality system.