You know the problem: You’ve had a product in production for years with recurring failures you can’t seem to stop. Your people say it’s inherent to the product, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Production continues and so do the failures. You get to watch a sizeable chunk of your profits continue to move from the production line to the scrap bin.

This paper presents a methodology for identifying and eliminating problem root causes, and specifically, the root causes of complex systems failures.

This article describes a cluster bomb failure and outlines steps required to find and correct the failure’s root cause.