Developing Problem Solving skills

SCRA Training in Sections Mill

SCRA (Symptom, Cause, Remedy, Action)

Why do employees need training? Thee are two points of view to take into account.

From the point of view of the employee, I remember when I was at Airbus and I once met a worker who told me he didn’t need any additional training or knowledge about TQM due to his 30 years of experience. I commented this with his colleagues and one of them smiled and stated: “he actually has one year of experience, just repeated 29 times”.

From the point of view of the employer, it is well-known that some companies can be afraid of spending resources (time / money) in training their people if there is any possibility of them going to another company after it, so the current employer could not take advantage of the new skills of the employee. However, the point is that “the only thing worse than training employees and losing them is to not train them and keep them” (quote by Zig Ziglar).

The content of the SCRA course:

In Sections Mill we were aware that the quality of some of the  SCRA’s (our TQM Practical Problem Solving tool) were not the best and did not let us find the root cause of cobbles, delays or quality issues, so we decided to start a new SCRA Training Course in 2015 to improve the root-cause analysis skills of some of our employees from Production (L3-5) and Engineering (L4-5).

The training starts with a brief introduction of the concept of SCRA (Symptom, Cause, Remedy, Action) and a reminder of when we have to start a new SCRA in our business unit (if cobble, 45min delay or 5Tn lost). Next, we try to make aware why is so important to use this tool correctly, gathering all the necessary information from the beginning and finding the true root cause. Some examples are provided of cobbles or delays which has happened two times in the same shift due to the same reason, just because the root-cause of the problem was not found at first either because of lack of deep investigation or other special causes. Finally, we go through some SCRA’s to review them (we also do an example from scratch if necessary) so we can have some feedback about how they would have done the SCRA or what they would improve in the SCRA system structure. In fact, some of the improvements suggested have already implemented.

Lessons Learned:

In Sections Mill we believe we have to ease the work of our people as much as possible, so we have tried to  improve the SCRA system including some changes such as: include an option to select the type of action (corrective, preventive, improvement); save the SCRA automatically as it is being filled; have the possibility of filtering the SCRA’s by product; assign every SCRA to a person, so he would be the owner and responsible for its correct completion (ownership is key to get things done); include some words to explain what information we need from every part of the Sympton (What, Who, When, Where, How).