ABSTRACT
The leadership of an organization has the authority and influence to walk into the future, find potential areas of risk and vulnerability, and then do something about them now in the present to either prevent the problems from occurring, or mitigate and neutralize their effects if they were to occur. This chapter presents a case study to look at a company that had not spent much time examining and analyzing the future. The case study involves a company that makes plastic bottles used to hold a variety of liquids, including spring water and soft drinks. Its current process produced bottles at rates approaching 200 bottles per minute. The chapter presents a simple Excel spreadsheet that the team developed to evaluate each of the potential failure modes for occurrence, severity, and detection. The team will consider all that is known about each failure mode and seek additional information as needed to estimate as accurately as possible.
