Hey, Ms. Auditee: Did Mickey Mouse Do Your Root Cause Analysis?

If it sounds like an excuse, it probably is.

In my March 24th column, I discussed how you should handle audits that point out a minor or "Mickey Mouse" nonconformance. In this column, I am going to look at this from the auditor’s point of view, when it’s obvious that the auditee did not take a nonconformance seriously and didn’t bother to do an honest root cause analysis.

OK, so as an auditor, you issued a nonconformity to your auditee or vendor, and you are hoping that they will review the problem in such a manner that it will be solved, and similar problems will be prevented from happening again. You ask for a formal response, and to your surprise it is nothing more than a restatement of the problem and a promise to do better. You know your auditee is working on a solution, but the response is truly lousy. How do you tell your client politely that the response is not acceptable?

Excuses are second nature

If you were ever tempted to say, “My dog ate my homework” when you were young, then you know that problems cannot be solved with excuses.

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Comments

Mickey Mouse RCA

Good article and very much to the point. This attitude towards non-conformances is prevalent and very frustrating. I have often heard the comment, "I am too busy trying to make product to bother about that stuff". Yeah right, you're making product which doesn't conform Mr. Production Manager so why not stop and find out why things are going wrong and then you can actually make something good to sell.

Thanks for the article Ms Boudreaux

Mickey Mouse Audit Findings

Sorry Miriam, I've taught the CQA refresher for the local ASQ section for many years, and I respectfully disagree with the premise that a full root cause analysis should be expected in response to Mickey Mouse" audit findings.

Mickey Mouse findings should never even make it onto the audit report. The auditee does not have unlimited resources and cannot afford to waste them on insignificant or isolated issues. If the auditee perceives the finding as Mickey Mouse level, I would say that the auditor didn't do their homework to justify the severity and significance of the finding...and the expense of devoting the auditee resources to fully investigate and solve the problem.

The auditor needs to address why 1 shipment being 2 days late rises to the level that justifies that response. Did the production line go down or did someone die due to lack of material at a significant cost to the customer?Is this 1 shipment a symptom of a bigger problem? How does the observation indicate a significant or systemic problem that must be corrected?

The most important question an auditor must ask fwhen determining what should rise the the level of significance of an audit finding is...So What? If that's not obvious to the auditee, the finding shouldn't be on the report. If the auditee doesn't see the importance, the problem is with the audit report.

Too many inexperienced or egotistical auditors go into an audit feeling that they "must find something". They document insignificant findings on the audit report, confident that they "did their job well" without realizing all the non-value-added effort that must now be done for tracking and rationalizing and agonizing over why the supplier needs to fix something that is not really broken.

The problem is not the analysis to fix these findings but the fact that these findings continue to be tolerated on audit reports by the auditor's managers (who are often more concerned with checking off the box that the audit was done rather than the content and impact to the organization). Before going back to the auditee, the auditor (or Audit Program Management) should ask, why isn't the auditee taking this issue more seriously...and do we need to waste more resources pressing the issue.Root cause analysis is an important power tool in our problem solving arsenel, and I agree it is often done incorrectly. However, let's not call for a chain saw when a hand clipper will do.

Mickey Mouse matters.

All non-conformances are important. 3 Mickey Mouse non-conformances can add up to 1 disaster, maybe 1 lost Client. And Mickey Mouse non-conformances are usually very cheap to fix. How much does it cost to get one active Client - can you really afford to throw one away?