Investigative Problem Solving
Your toughest defects aren't a mystery. They're an investigation waiting to happen.
Most Quality departments are built for compliance. The real money is in problem solving — and that takes a professional.
The problem with how Quality is set up
Almost every Quality department is designed to maintain a system — compliance, inspection, paperwork. Necessary work. But it's not where the money is.
In the Cost of Quality model, failure costs dwarf prevention and appraisal. Every production run, elusive defects quietly eat your profit. Yet almost no one is dedicated to hunting them down.
That's the gap. And it's the single richest opportunity for effectiveness in your entire operation.
Where the cost lives is where the opportunity lives.
Why guesswork is costing you
The industry standard — 8D and methods like it — treats problem solving like a guessing game. The team brainstorms a long list of "possible causes," and then every candidate has to be confirmed or refuted.
Confirmed or refuted how? With a statistical test, an understanding of alpha and beta risks and knowing minimum sample sizes, topics many have long forgotten. So we ask every member to validate every idea, and we bury the whole effort under an avalanche of work.
Problem solving is a core business process. It should not be left to guesswork.
A better method
Investigative Problem Solving
I teach a convergent approach. Instead of generating a sprawling list of suspects, you isolate the weak point in your process and zoom in on the true root cause.
Isolate
Narrow the field to the actual weak point in the process, not a wish-list of maybes.
Zoom in
Converge on the true root cause with evidence, not a vote around the table.
Capture the knowledge
Every root cause is knowledge about your system of production, a durable company asset.
Your Quality team needs at least one person dedicated strictly to solving the tough, elusive problems. This is professional capability and it's absent in many companies.
Proof, not theory
Problems that lingered for years were solved quickly.
Lithium battery factory - low cell capacity, resolved with experimental design.
Plastics injection molding - chronic print problems eliminated.
Electrode manufacturing - two projects took the defect rate below 1%.
Many problems that had persisted for months and years - resolved through Investigative Problem Solving.
Who you'd be working with
Chris Butterworth
ASQ Certified Master Black Belt
One of roughly 200 people worldwide to hold ASQ's Master Black Belt certification, with 35+ years in manufacturing Quality.
Decades of hunting down the tough, elusive defects and teaching teams to do the same with a disciplined, investigative method rather than guesswork.
The training
The Belfield Investigative Method
Five days inside the convergent, evidence-driven method — from reading the Y to the problem post-mortem. You leave able to isolate the weak point in your process and converge on the true root cause.
- 01Problem management
- 02Understanding the Y
- 03y = f(x)
- 04Path combinations
- 05Distributions
- 06Searching for clues
- 07Tukey–Duckworth Sums
- 08Sum of variances
- 09Weight as covariate
- 10Parts swap
- 11Finding the structure behind random failures
- 12Process investigation
- 13Common features of manufacturing processes
- 14Problem post-mortem
Let's talk
If profit is walking out the door with every production run, let's find out why.
To book the five-day course for your team, or to talk through a specific problem, reach out directly.