Your organization can solve tough issues: we can show you how
Expert facilitation provides impartial guidance to help your teams solve crises when emotions are running high. This substantially increases the efficiency and effectiveness of finding a solution, while gaining the support and commitment of all involved.
Not only is a problem solved, but your troubleshooting team will have experience in a new method they can apply to future critical situations.
Kepner-Tregoe’s Facilitation Approach
Understand
The facilitator conducts a historical review of the problem together with key individuals. At this level, we want to understand and define the areas that require further details, discussion and measurement, as well as to advise stakeholders on the outcomes to expect and next steps to achieve.
Clarify
To align the team around the issues to be addressed and the work to be done, a full-group review of all fact-finding information is examined to identify, clarify and prioritize all issues surrounding the problem.
Data gathering
For each specific problem, the facilitator guides the group to gather facts that describe the problem and identify what information is missing. This helps the people involved focus on where to look, who to talk to and what questions to ask.
Once this description of the basic facts is sufficient, the facilitator uses it to guide the group to identify potential causal factors that are unique to the problem. Again, these facts about the problem help guide people’s search for additional data. This information sets up the data gathering tasks for the next session.
Hypothesis development
Examination of the facts about the problem and the potential causal factors unique to the problem offers a higher level of clarity and focus to avoid distractions and false trails. By comparing the data about factual events that relate to the problem, ideas that might be hidden from view emerge, allowing the team to develop and identify possible causes.
Testing possible causes
This is a logic test to eliminate false causes and guide the development of a confirmation plan. By comparing their hypotheses against the facts of the problem, the team can gain insight about which causes just don’t make sense, and where there are gaps in their understanding of the causes that do make sense.
Verified cause and next steps
Up to this point, the steps of the process have been data gathering and analysis, keeping costs for resolution at a minimum. Now they need to go out to the factory floor or the field, either to gather existing data or take actions to create new data. The documentation from the testing phase is the blueprint for these activities. Once the problem has been solved, the results can also serve to inform stakeholders for future maintenance and adjustment.
Why KT?
Kepner-Tregoe facilitation provides a clear, structured, and proven process that enables teams to effectively tackle complex problems and identify their root causes.
While intuition, gut feelings, or experience may be sufficient for familiar problems, they often prove ineffective – or even counterproductive – when the situation is new or unusual. In such cases, they can lead to further delays, prolonged downtime, and increased costs.
The KT approach offers a rational framework that replaces assumptions with rigorous analysis, thereby speeding up resolution while minimizing risks.
Case Studies Section
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$11M
saved in the first year
60%
improvement in on-time performance
50%
reduction in admin workload
Défis
Kennecott Utah Copper operates the Bingham canyon mine concentrator plant, a smelter and a refinery. Ore from this mine is concentrated into slurry, piped to where the smelting process occurs, and then sent to the refinery. Efficient operation at the concentrator stage is critical to maintaining uptime of the smelter. Each year the concentrator plant is shut down a total of 36 times. This is necessary to maintain critical equipment while essential repairs and upgrades are completed. The issue at Bingham was that the length of downtime was causing a bottleneck in the overall process.
Read Case StudyRésultats
The shutdown process saved over $11 million in the first year of implementation. On-time performance improved by 60% and is tracking towards world-class results. key performance Indicators (KPls) for shutdown performance improved over all prior years. Team performance (on-scope, on-cost) improved by 60%. Shutdown administrative work load fell by over 50% allowing team members to focus on other areas such as reducing cost or generating more revenue. All Injury Frequency Rate (AIFR) improved, advancing a strong safety culture which is a core value of KUCC.
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47%
improvement in operational efficiency
30%
improvement in production rate
50%
reduction in change over time
Défis
After a major capital investment at its biscuit factory at Papakura, Griffin’s needed to address several variables impacting overall conversion cost. The site was struggling with high waste, high downtime, and planning deficiencies; and overall workflow was not conducive to producing at the lowest possible conversion cost.
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For overall results, Operational Efficiency (OE), the measure of line performance relative to a theoretical maximum achievable throughput rate, was used to measure success. To achieve an OE of 100%, the line must run at its maximum theoretical throughput rate with zero plant downtime and product waste. At the conclusion of the Kepner-Tregoe engagement the plant achieved:
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€4.5M
decrease in spin-off costs
70%
non-conformity reduction in 3 years in specific departments
Défis
Fokker wanted to increase their issue resolution maturity. This meant improving the quality and completeness of information about problems, accelerating root cause analysis and involving the right people at the right time.
Read Case StudyRésultats
Success has been measured in a drastic reduction in non-conformities which is saving millions of euros yearly. A proactive culture has replaced the “fire-fighting” of reactive problem solving.