Root Cause Analysis and Incident Investigation FAQs

What is an Incident?

An incident is an actual loss event or a near miss that should be investigated so that effective actions can be taken to prevent the same or similar losses from happening again. Incidents may have a negative impact on health, safety, reliability or company reputation.

What are Causal Factors?

Causal factors are human errors or equipment problems that directly led to the loss event or allowed the consequences of the event to be more severe. Elimination of the causal factors will prevent recurrence of the losses or reduce the consequences of the event. Many investigations and root cause analyses simply identify these causal factors and make recommendations to correct them. This may prevent the same event from recurring, but if the root causes are not addressed, similar events are likely to happen in the future. The root causes of these causal factors must also be identified and corrected.

What are Root Causes?

Root causes are the management system weaknesses that allowed the causal factor to occur. Management systems help control the work process and encourage personnel to take the appropriate actions and discourage them from taking inappropriate actions. Examples of typical management systems include:

Equipment Design Process
Procedures
Supervision
Standards and Policies
Training
Communication Practices
Maintenance Practices

Once deficiencies in management systems have been addressed, employees and equipment are set up to succeed. ABS Consulting's analysis methods are designed to systematically identify these management system weaknesses.

Why ABS Consulting?

Recognized as industry leaders, ABS Consulting experts have performed hundreds of investigations. Our investigation process, which requires no licensing fees or similar costs, utilizes effective, efficient analytical tools that can be customized for your organization.

Our investigators train clients' employees to perform their own incident investigations. ABS Consulting offers several public courses each year and provides onsite training for employees using their site-specific procedures and scenarios. We also offer a 24-hour hotline for immediate, direct access to a lead investigator day or night.

Additionally, our organization has developed RCA Software, an easy-to-use software that helps users perform root cause analysis and track and trend resulting data. We have also developed an Excel worksheet that enables users to document a causal factor diagram and fault trees.

For more information...

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info@absconsulting.com | Tel: 1-281-673-2800 | Fax: 1-281-673-2950

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