Root Cause Analysis

A finding tells you what went wrong. Root Cause Analysis is where you work out why — in a form that can be reviewed, reused and audited later.

qportal ships two methods, each with its own app: 5-Why Analyses for a quick, linear investigation, and 8D Analyses for a full team-based problem-solving process. Both live in the Root Cause Analysis group on the launchpad.

Why a structured analysis at all

ISO 9001:2015 (clause 10.2.1 b) asks you to evaluate the cause of a nonconformity, not just to name it. A free-text note like “operator error” satisfies nobody: it can’t be reviewed, it can’t be compared across cases, and it gives the corrective action nothing to attach to.

A structured analysis gives you three things a text field cannot:

• a documented chain of reasoning that a third party can follow,
• a cause category (Man, Method, Machine, Material, Environment, Measurement) that makes recurring problem patterns visible across cases,
• measures that are linked to the analysis they came from, and that show up in the same Action Items worklists as everything else.

Choosing between 5-Why and 8D

	5-Why	8D
Typical duration	Minutes to hours	Days to weeks
Who works on it	One person, sometimes with a colleague	A named team with defined roles
Typical trigger	A single finding, a one-off deviation	Customer complaint, supplier deviation, repeated or safety-relevant problem
Structure	One chain of “Why?” questions, up to five levels	Eight defined steps (D1–D8), including immediate containment and prevention
Immediate containment	Not part of the method	D3 — explicitly required before the cause is even known
Effectiveness proof	Verification before completion	Verification before completion, plus formal closure with signature (D8)
Output for the customer	Internal documentation	Printable D0–D8 report (PDF)

A practical rule of thumb: use 5-Why when you already suspect where the problem sits and only need to dig deeper in one direction. Use 8D when the problem reached a customer, when you need people from several departments, or when you must be able to hand over a report.

The methods are not mutually exclusive — the 8D process contains a 5-Why chain as its D4 step, so nothing is lost if you start small and escalate later.

Two ways to start an analysis

From a finding. Open the finding and choose Start Root-Cause Analysis. You pick the method, give the analysis a title, and qportal takes you straight into the new analysis. The finding keeps a link to every analysis started from it — see Creating & Classifying Findings.

Standalone. Open the 5-Why Analyses or 8D Analyses app and choose Create. Use this for anything that has no audit behind it: a customer complaint, a supplier deviation, a scrap rate that drifted out of range.

Both paths produce the same kind of record. The only difference is whether the Finding field is filled.

Who may do what

Root Cause Analysis has two roles of its own, because the people who solve a problem are often not the people from the audit team:

Role	May do
Root Cause Contributor	Create analyses, and edit the analyses they created or are a team member of
Root Cause Manager	Work on every analysis, and — exclusively — approve or reject an analysis submitted for verification

Approval is deliberately kept out of the working team’s hands: the people who investigated a problem should not be the ones confirming that their own solution worked. See Roles & Permissions.

Next steps

• 5-Why Analysis — the quick, linear method
• 8D Analysis — the full team process, D1 to D8
• Analysis Lifecycle — statuses, verification and closure