Band-Aids® & Root Cause Analysis

By Kevin Biller

I’m a hands-on kind of guy. I must spend at least half of my waking hours fixing something, trouble-shooting a problem or building something from scratch. It could involve something as concrete as recalibrating an electric oven or as abstract as identifying steric hindrance as a cause of insufficient crosslink density of a powder coating.

Because of this bent on fixing things, I seem to have a propensity to offer help to foundering colleagues. You’re probably familiar with my “Ask Joe Powder” column and my history as a consultant/ trainer, etc. Consequently, I have the privilege of entertaining a myriad of pleas for help from powder coating technologists, ranging from the sublime to the preposterous. All too often the request is to “fix” a problem with a Band-Aid®. Let me provide a couple examples.

One request I recently encountered involved a query about conductive powder coating technology. Fair enough, conductive powder coatings have their place in industry. Powder coatings have been developed to exhibit electrostatic dissipation (ESD), a valuable property for sensitive electronic processes. ESD powder coatings possess enough conductivity to drain ambient static electricity from coated surfaces thereby keeping errant electricity from harming electronic components during handling and assembly.

However, this was a request for a conductive powder coating to alleviate a problem a coater was having with poor grounding of the hooks that hold and convey parts to be coated. The coater felt it made more sense to continue the deposition of excessive amounts of overspray powder onto hook connection points than to reduce/ eliminate the deposition of powder to these critical junctions. As we all know the electrostatic deposition of powder coatings relies on a good and consistent ground. This coater was experiencing an interruption of the ground with excessive buildup of oversprayed powder.

His solution was to switch his powder to an alternate material conductive enough to provide a consistent ground when the hooks and contact points got coated. This thinking is seriously flawed. Instead of implementing measures to eliminate the coating buildup or at least remove the excess coating, he was willing to change the quality of his powder coating. His assumptions included the expectation that no other performance features would be compromised (coating flexibility, hardness, chemical resistance, application, gloss, color, cost, etc.) by switching to a conductive powder. It seemed he never considered identifying the root cause and minimizing or eliminated it.

I recommended scrapping the conductive powder concept and to execute Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to identify the primary problem and to explore remedial actions. In the meantime, he could implement a program to clean hooks before they started to compromise the proper grounding of parts to be coated.

As a short term fix, I recommended that he develop a technique to eliminate the defect in the field (e.g., scuff sanding and cleaning) and to re-coat the area with a liquid touch-up paint. The touch-up paint and the process to apply it would have to be carefully developed to ensure adhesion to the substrate and performance per the original coating specification. A second intermediate measure would be to beef up his inspection process by training his personnel to identify defects on parts before they are packed-out and shipped to the customer. This would enable him to catch defective parts and to re-process them in his facility. Integral to this approach is a clear identification of what constitutes a defect—and an acceptable part, for that matter. The monitoring and recording of defect frequency and establishment of quality goals was also strongly encouraged.

What I really emphasized was a quest to eliminate the defects in the first place. This is another case where I instructed a coater to implement Root Cause Analysis to identify defects and to develop and implement measures to eliminate them. The process is really rather simple and very logical. It is composed of the following steps:

1. Define and characterize the problem or defect (data collection, communication, analysis).

2. Explore and examine possible causes. Fishbone diagrams work well here (the 5 Ms: man, machine, method, material, Mother Nature).

3. Qualify and rank possible causes (more data collection and analysis).

4. Explore and examine remediation measures. Rank, prioritize and estimate the costs of measures.

5. Implement remediation per a set plan (timing, responsibilities, costs, reviews, etc.). This will probably require changes to policies, procedures, training and culture.

6. Continue to monitor quality and adjust procedures and policies as necessary (continuous improvement).

This process can be applied to a vast array of problems and trouble-shooting efforts. It could be a serious production problem that requires immediate action or an administrative issue that has the luxury to undergo a long-term and careful analysis. Regardless of the problem RCA should become part of any operation’s culture. It doesn’t require sophisticated tools, expensive components or extensive training. What it does entail is a full-fledged commitment by all individuals involved in the process from company owners to production operators and a discipline to adhere to the RCA process through to problem resolution.

Hopefully this will allow the Band-Aid® mentality that pervades too many operations to become a distant memory.

Kevin Biller is technical editor for Powder Coated Tough magazine. He can be reached at kevinbiller@yahoo.com.

Band-Aid® brand is a registered trademark of Johnson & Johnson