Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 00:46:13 -0800

From: Tu Dinh Nguyen

To: Joseph N. Pangilinan

Hi Joseph,

Wow! There are real problems existed in your company.

You have some common UDEs, and some unique UDEs.

Here is the list I came up with after reading your story. You can add or delete some of them if you don't think they are valid. You know your company better than I do. Also, they are not in order of important. They are just randomly numbered for you and I easy to communicate.

UDE #15: There is pressure from stockholders for company to get better UDE #16: Management is frustrated about quality problems UDE #17: Marketing and production are not working together.

Joseph,

What you have to do now is to write these UDEs each on a post-it and stick each of them on the big board. Pull a team of key energetic people togther.

Select people who like to think logic.

Start connect the first two UDEs together which are related. This is the concept of Cause-and-Effect. Ask yourself which one causes the other to occur? And then slowly connect the others. There are situations where you need to add more intermediate entity (not UDE) to make the connection logically correct.

For example:

IF (UDE #17: Marketing and production are not working together) AND (100:Marketing and production do not have clear instructions)

THEN

(101:Marketing and production processes are not consistent)

IF (101:Marketing and production processes are not consistent)

THEN (102:people tend to blame eachother)

100, 102, 102 are intermediate entity, or current reality which exist in reality but they are not UDEs. (More example of current reality: Water is available, there is 52 week in a year...)

Remember to number each of them so you can trace them when your tree get bigger (multiple pages)

When you draw the tree, you should number 100s for all entities on page 1, 200s for all entities on page 2, 300s for all entities on page 3 ...

You need a S/W drawing package such as Visio or Rfflow to draw the tree.

Check the logic carefully, use Categories of Ligitimate Reservation (CLR):

If you don't you will have difficulty later on.

Ask yourself again and again question like;"Does this really cause that? or does it need something else to support the logic?..."

If the logic is wrong, when you present the tree to your people, they will not agree. In TOC, we call this a WET TREE! A DRY TREE is a good logic tree.

Review It's Not Luck and Dettmer's book.

You need to logically connect all the UDEs. I expect this CRT will be about 6 to 10 pages long (8.5 x 11 inches size paper) Anything less will be WET.

You first try will be WET, this does need some practice. That's ok, it takes time to build a DRY tree. Once you are done with your first cut of CRT, you can send to me and I will review it and help you to scruntinize it.

By the time you are done, the CORE PROBLEM will be the one which causes at least 70% of the UDEs to occur. Also your management team and employees will understand more about your company processes and your quality products.

Until then they will work hard. It is a human nature, it is hard to ask people do something they don't understand.

I don't see your company's problems can be anybody fault. It is the processes and policies needed to be understood before people can be motivated to work. Empower your employees to look and help to build the CRT, make the CRT to be the Company's CRT, not your or Top management.

You can do it.