8D report

Method

• What 8D is here: the eight disciplines as commonly practised since Ford’s Team Oriented Problem Solving (with D0 added later). This page follows general practice, not a normative standard: customers and companies have their own forms and rules, and their requirements come first. D0 symptom and emergency response, D1 team, D2 problem description (5W2H and is / is not), D3 interim containment, D4 root causes, D5 permanent corrective actions, D6 implementation and validation, D7 prevent recurrence, D8 closure and recognition.
• Status: each discipline is not started, in progress or done, with the date it was completed. The report is open until D8 is done, then closed; days open run from the opening date to today (or to the closing date). Closing while a discipline or an action is still open, or without a verified root cause, is shown as a warning, never blocked.
• Ishikawa diagram (D4): the six categories most teams start from (6M: man / people, machine, method, material, measurement, environment) can be renamed, removed, reordered or added to. Causes and one level of sub-causes are added, edited, moved and removed with the fields and buttons under the diagram (Enter in a cause adds the next one); the drawing follows at once. Each cause is not assessed, suspected (“?”, italic), a verified root cause (“✓”, bold) or ruled out (“✕”, struck through), so the status never depends on colour. Text is wrapped to a fixed width; the diagram grows with the causes and scrolls sideways on narrow screens. Export SVG saves it as a file (black on white); it is also in the printed report.
• 5 Why: one chain per question, for why the problem occurred and for why it escaped detection, as is common practice. A chain can start from a cause of the diagram (“5 Why” beside it). Five is a rule of thumb: a chain holds 1 to 12 answers. Use as root cause turns the last answer into a root cause statement.
• Root causes: occurrence or escape, with how each was verified (for example switched on and off, or reproduced). Only verified root causes are proposed to the PFMEA.
• Actions: D3, D5, D6 and D7 actions have an owner, start, due and done dates, a status (open, in progress, done, cancelled), the verification of their effect and an effectiveness in percent (0–100). An action is overdue when it is open or in progress and its due date is before today (due today is not overdue); done and cancelled actions are never overdue. A done action finished after its due date is marked “done late”. The Actions tab lists all of them with filters by discipline, status, overdue and owner.
• Lessons learned back into risk (PFMEA link): the report is linked to the process step, failure mode and cause of a PFMEA project (the project saved in this browser by the PFMEA page, a PFMEA file, or the example); when the failure mode is not in the PFMEA, the step function, its text, effect and severity are given instead. From the verified root causes and the actions the page proposes: a new failure mode (when missing), a new cause for each occurrence root cause not yet in the PFMEA (with the occurrence and detection ratings as reassessed, and the done prevention / detection actions as its controls), changed occurrence and detection ratings of the causes the root causes stand for (an escape root cause rates the detection of the linked cause), new current controls from done D5–D7 actions marked as prevention or detection controls, and PFMEA actions from those still open. Nothing is written until you tick a change and confirm. Each change goes through the PFMEA’s own editing operations and adds a line “from 8D <number>: …” to the PFMEA change log; proposals already in the PFMEA are shown as such. Undo the last PFMEA update puts the PFMEA back as long as it was not changed since (otherwise undo it on the PFMEA page). Changes to the project saved in this browser show on the PFMEA, control plan and dimensional report pages. The AP of the changed chains comes from the PFMEA’s unverified AP table (see the PFMEA page).
• Output: Save JSON writes the report file (format factokit-8d, schema 1; older schemas are migrated when opened, newer ones refused). Export XLSX writes one sheet per section (summary, D0–D8, actions, PFMEA link) and the whole report in a hidden sheet, so the workbook opens here again; edits made in Excel are noticed and not read back. Print / PDF prints the whole report on A4 portrait with the header on every page, page numbers in the margin (browsers without margin boxes print without them) and the diagram.
• Saving: one report at a time is saved automatically in this browser (its own record, apart from the PFMEA project); nothing is sent anywhere. Use Save JSON to keep several reports as files.
• Limits: no statistics are computed here (use the Pareto, capability and control chart tools for the data); the Excel file has no cell formatting; the guide texts are this tool’s own short wording, not taken from a standard or handbook.