There may be no activity more fraught with variable factors contributing to operations problems than the process of shipping products to hundreds of different clients. Every problem seems to include some unique situation or process that has contributed to a problem for both the organization and its client. With so many variables: personnel, carriers, policies, facilities, currencies, and regulations, it may at times seem overwhelming. But, REASON can bring order from chaos quickly.

The key to getting a quick handle on shipping problems is to examine your analysis data from three perspectives:

• Isolating those issues that are unique to your client’s environment
• Identifying issues that are internally controlled by your organization
• Finding your internal issues that are shared in common among problems

REASON is ideally suited for operating in the shipping environment because the REASON process is designed to discover all issues that causally contributed to an occurrence. REASON is a repeatable process with criteria for accuracy and completeness, and thus does not rely upon subjective and personal opinions, assumptions and judgments. Having verifiably accurate and complete information that can be shared with clients and that can be studied for instances in which different problems have shared some internally controllable cause in common, provides new and dramatic opportunities both to broadly improve overall operations and to zero-in on causes unique to one client. DuPont Logistics immediately saw the implications of a repeatable problem solving process and structured an alliance opportunity for their clients and vendors to team together with them in REASON Root Cause Analysis activities on mutual problems.