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8D problem solving report builder

Run an 8D report from team and problem description through containment, root cause, corrective and preventive action to closure, with dates, age and completeness.

Quality worksheetsFor membersHow it worksSourcesWhere it helps

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How it works

An 8D report is the structured way to deal with a problem found by a customer or by your own line: protect the customer, describe the problem, find and prove the cause, fix it, stop it recurring and close the report. This worksheet holds one report as rows, one discipline per row, and shows how complete each discipline is, how old the report is, which items are overdue and what is missing before it can be closed.

  1. One report, one sheet. Each row is an item in one of the disciplines D0 to D8, with a detail, an owner, a date and a status. Some rows carry extra fields: is and is not rows and a dimension (what, where, when, how many) in D2, an effectiveness percentage and a verified flag in D3 and D5, and a cause category, a cause type (occurrence or escape) and a why chain in D4.
  2. The disciplines. D0 emergency response and the decision to run an 8D. D1 the team and its roles. D2 the problem description, with is and is not. D3 interim containment. D4 root causes: the occurrence cause (why it happened) and the escape cause (why it was not caught). D5 chosen corrective actions with verification. D6 implementation. D7 prevention across similar products and systems. D8 closure and recognition of the team. Some organisations start with a D0 step and some do not; the tool includes it.
  3. Completeness. Each discipline has a short list of checks, for example that D3 has at least one action, that each has an effectiveness figure and that they are verified. The completeness of a discipline is the share of its checks passed, and the overall score is the share of all checks passed. The checks are a Hub template, not a customer's report form.completeness = checks passed / checks in the discipline; score = all checks passed / all checks
  4. Age and time in each discipline. The age is the days from the opening date to today, or to the closure date once a D8 row is done with a date. The time in a discipline is the days from the previous milestone to its own milestone, where a milestone is the latest dated item in the discipline and the first runs from the opening date. Real work overlaps, so read these as a guide to where the time went.age = today − opened (or closure date − opened); days in Dn = milestone Dn − latest earlier milestone
  5. Overdue and ready to close. An item is overdue when its date is before today and its status is open or in progress. The list of what is missing before closure is every failed check, for example no escape root cause or containment not verified, plus the number of items still open. Close the report when the list is clear.overdue days = today − item date
  6. The two causes. Record the occurrence cause and the escape cause separately, each with a category (man, machine, method, material, measurement, environment) and a chain of whys. A corrective action should name the cause it answers, so that every cause is covered. Three whys is the minimum the tool accepts; the aim is to reach a cause you can act on, not a fixed count.

Assumptions

  • The checks and the wording of the disciplines are a Hub template based on the published 8D method; your customer's own report form and deadlines take precedence.
  • A team leader is recognised by the word leader in the item or detail of a D1 row.
  • An action names its cause in the cause field using the same words as the cause's item title (letter case is ignored).
  • Dates are yyyy-mm-dd; today's date is an input, so the age and overdue list are repeatable.
  • The example reports are invented; the companies, parts, numbers and dates are not real.

Limits and warnings

  • The tool does not judge the quality of a root cause or the strength of a verification; it checks that they are recorded.
  • It does not apply any customer's time targets (for example for containment or the first report); add them as items with dates.
  • Disciplines run in parallel in practice; the time in each discipline is measured from dated items only.
  • It does not reproduce any report template or form; export the sheet as CSV or JSON, or print it, and copy it across to the form your customer requires.

Sources

The methods and default figures rest on these public sources. The wording here is our own; read the source for its full text.

Where it helps

The lifecycle stages this tool serves: 3 stages in 3 lifecycles.

Terms on this page

8D
A structured quality response process, universal in automotive, that runs from containment through root cause analysis to permanent corrective action, verification and prevention, documented on a s...
Containment
The immediate actions taken to stop suspect material reaching or affecting the customer, including sorting stock, quarantining lots, adding temporary inspection and defining the suspect date code w...
CAPA
The formal system for recording a nonconformance, implementing the change that removes its cause, verifying that the change worked, and extending the lesson to similar processes and products so the...
D0
The average number of yield-killing defects per unit area, conventionally per square centimetre, used as the single parameter summarising a process's random defect performance in yield models.

The full glossary

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