Poor quality still drains billions from manufacturing balance-sheets, yet many QA teams remain stuck in detect-and-fix mode—inspecting finished goods, writing NCRs, and scrambling to patch symptoms.
In our latest PRIZ Academy webinar, co-founders Alex Agulyansky and Dr. Anatoly Agulyansky demonstrated a more powerful approach: predict-and-prevent quality powered by rigorous Root-Cause Analysis (RCA) and the PRIZ Engineering-Thinking Platform.
Why This Topic Matters
- Inspection is too late. Defects caught at the end of the line have already consumed material, capacity, and customer goodwill.
- “Human error” isn’t helpful. Blaming operators masks deeper process interactions that will resurface.
- RCA is a team sport. Engineering, chemistry, operations, and quality must share a single source of truth.
Five Key Takeaways
- Shift the mindset: QA’s primary question is “Are we running the process so defects never happen?”
- Map interactions, not symptoms: Tools like Cause-and-Effect Chains expose the domino effects hidden in complex systems.
- Model before you fix: Functional Modelling clarifies what each element does versus what you think it does.
- Reports should write themselves: Auto-generated documentation frees engineers to focus on insight, not slide formatting.
- Continuous memory beats tribal knowledge: Every RCA becomes searchable reference material for the next problem.
