5 Steps for Automating Root Cause Analysis

Equipment downtime. Service interruptions. Performance issues. All of these frustrations affect the day-to-day productivity and profitability of manufacturing operations, keeping technicians busy responding to problems. Automating root cause analysis (RCA) offers a solution.

According to Industry Week, the average cost of manufacturing system downtime is $17,000 per minute or well over $1,000,000 per hour! Yet too many manufacturing facilities end up being reactive, responding to service outages as quickly as possible without the luxury of additional time to investigate the underlying root cause of the situation. Without discovering the source of the problem, engineers end up treating symptoms instead of causes, applying short-term band-aids to long-term conditions with a high probability.

“Root cause analysis is a principle-based, systems approach for the identification of underlying causes associated with a particular set of risks.”

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Traditional root cause analysis involves trial and error, fishbone diagrams, and asking five specific questions to identify contributing factors, but advances in anomaly detection, event correlation, and automation have made it possible to reduce the guesswork in finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.

IT teams need modern performance analytics solutions to help them spend less time reacting to performance issues and more time finding the root causes that negatively impact the business, revenue, and expenses. Anomaly detection, event correlation, and automation allow IT operations teams to streamline the root cause analysis process, maintain service delivery levels and minimize the cost of unplanned downtime and system outages.

This guide explains the five steps proactive operations teams have taken to automate root cause analysis in full detail. Read the full ebook today!