The framework
The eight categories
Eight causal categories, each with an owner who can be held to a corrective action.
The industry standard, used as written.
The eight are the 8M set, the standard category scheme for the cause and effect diagram, which is itself the most used of Ishikawa's seven quality control tools. Your quality people already know this partition. Most of them were taught it.
We did not invent a new one, and that is deliberate. What we argue is narrower. Two things practitioners are currently taught to treat as optional are not optional here.
The eight
What each one asks.
Man
Qualification and competence
Is everyone qualified, current, competent within scope, and carrying a workload that permits the standard?
Machine
Equipment and the systems driving it
Are the equipment and the systems driving it capable, available, and configured to the current standard?
Material
Inputs and inbound information
Are inputs in specification, in date, traceable, and complete at the point of decision?
Method
Procedure and standard work
Does the documented procedure match the work actually performed, and does it prevent the error rather than catch it downstream?
Measurement
Data, definition, and abstraction
Can the measurement system separate real variation from its own noise?
Mother Nature
The physical environment of the work
Are the physical conditions inside the window the work requires?
Maintenance
Asset upkeep and recall
Is preventive maintenance completed on interval rather than deferred, with alerts and recalls actioned?
Management
Resourcing, targets, and governance
Do the resourcing, the targets, and the documented standard coexist, and what happens to the person who stops the line?
Two rules
What we do differently.
All eight, every time.
Every assessment covers all eight before any of them is scored. Each one is either scored on the evidence or recorded as unmeasurable, and the second of those is a result in its own right. Standard practice allows categories judged not applicable to be dropped from the diagram. We do not, because a category removed before the investigation is a category that cannot produce a finding, and the person deciding to remove it is frequently the person who would have owned it.
Maintenance and Management are separate.
Practice treats each of them as sometimes a category and sometimes a subset of something else, with the choice left to whoever is running the session. That is not cosmetic. Filing a failure under Maintenance produces a schedule and an engineering owner. Filing the same failure under Management produces a resourcing decision and an executive owner. Both are permanent here.
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