Incident Reports Cause Analysis

For some “Incident Reports”, a cause analysis might be required, this “cause-analysis” can be recorded on the “Incident Report” form “Causes” sub tab. The procedure adding causes to “Incident Reports” are the same as for Observations, Inspection findings and Failure Reports.

How to add an immediate cause to an Incident Report? 

To be better able to make the correct decision on what to do with an Incident, describing the cause of it is a good starting point. TM Master v2 can record “immediate causes”, and “system causes”. The “immediate cause” would be the most apparent ones. Here is how you record an immediate cause found during the analysis of the finding:

1. Open the Incident Report in question
2. Click the “Cause” sub tab.
3. Click the [Add Immediate Cause] button
4. Fill in the “immediate Cause” details
   1. Name: Enter a Cause description name
   2. Type: Select a “Cause type” from the “immediate cause” types. Please refer to chapter on cause types for additional details on how to configure them.
   3. Related to: For immediate causes this field will not be available. Please refer to the chapter next chapter on adding “System Causes” for more details on it.
   4. Main Cause: If this is to be considered the main cause for the finding, you can tick this check box. Please note only one cause pr. finding can be considered the main cause for it.  
   5. Cause description: Enter a description of the cause.
5. The additional fields in the “Cause Categorization” field group, is not possible to alter in this view as it is linked to the “Cause type”, and if alterations are required this must be done in the [Cause type] module

The Cause detail form 

How to add a system cause to an “Incident Report”? 

The chapter above described adding the “Immediate causes” for the Incident Report, which is all well and good. But it is not necessarily that easy to take actions based on the immediate cause description alone. We may need to find and describe the reason behind the immediate cause, and this is what TM Master refers to as “system causes”.  Since the exercise of asking “Why?” to any reason given may end up system causes explaining system causes, it is possible to add any number of system-causes either related to the immediate cause or to another system cause.

The procedure adding a “system cause” is very similar to adding a “immediate cause” Here is how it is done.

1. Open the “Incident Report” in question.
2. Click the “Cause” tab
3. Select a previously added “Immediate cause” or “System cause” in the list of causes
4. Click the [Add System Cause] button
5. Fill in the “System Cause” details
   1. Name: Enter a Cause description name
   2. Type: Select a “Cause type” from the “System cause types”. Please refer to chapter on cause types for additional details on how to configure them.
   3. Related to: This shows information on which other cause this “system cause” is directly related / linked to. It can be an “immediate cause” or another “system cause”. It is also possible to change the cause it relates to by clicking the […] button and selecting one of the other causes.
   4. Main Cause: If this is to be considered the main cause for the finding, you can tick this check box. Please note only one cause can be considered the main cause for a Incident.  
   5. Cause description: Enter a description of the cause.

You may select one of all your added causes as the “Main Cause” for the Incident report, the main cause will also be available as part of the Incident Report grids and can be used to filter and search on.