By Kim Smiley

Think of how many documents are scanned every day. Imagine how important some of these pieces of paper are, such as invoices, property records, and medical files. Now try to picture what might happen if the copies of these documents aren’t true copies. This is exactly the scenario that Xerox was recently facing.

It recently came to light that some copies of scanned documents were altered by the scanning process. Specifically, some scanner/copier machines changed numbers on documents. This issue can be analyzed by building a Cause Map, an intuitive, visual format for performing a root cause analysis. The first step in the Cause Mapping process is to fill in an Outline with the basic background information on an issue. Additionally, the impacts to the overall goals are documented on the Outline to help clarify the severity of any given issue. In this example, the customer service goal is impacted because the scanners weren’t operating as expected. There is also a potential impact to the overall economic goal because the altered documents could result in any number of issues. There is also an impact because of the labor needed to investigate and fix the problem.

After completing the Outline, the next step is ask “why” questions to build the Cause Map. Why weren’t the scanners operating as expected? This happened because the scanners were changing some documents during the scanning process. Scanners use software to help interpret the original documents and Xerox has stated that the problem happened because of a software bug. Testing showed that the number substitutions were more likely to occur when the settings on the scanners were set to lower quality/ higher compression because of the specific software used for these settings. Testing also showed that the error was more likely to occur when scanning those documents that were more difficult to read such as those with small fonts or that had already been copied multiple times.

Xerox had been aware of the potential for number substitution at lower quality settings, but didn’t appear to expect it to occur at factory settings (which was found to be very unlikely, but possible). A notice that stated that character substitutions were possible appeared on the scanners when lower resolution settings were selected and was included in some manuals, but this approach seems to have been ineffective since many users were caught unaware by this issue.

After a Cause Map has been built with enough detail to understand the issue, it can be used to help develop solutions. In this example, Xerox developed a software patch that corrected the error. Xerox also posted several blogs on their website to keep customers informed about the issue and worked with users to ensure that the patch was successful in correcting the error.

To see a high level Cause Map of this issue, click on “Download PDF” above.