Fae Intelligence · Root Cause Analyzer

Who's behind this

The honest version — no inflation.

Richard Snyder — founder of Fae Intelligence LLC (Oregon). BS Mechanical Engineering (Oregon State), MBA (University of Oregon), and roughly 30 years in quality engineering and operations, most of it hands-on in FDA-regulated medical-device manufacturing.

The background this tool is built on

• Full quality-management-system ownership in FDA-regulated medical device companies — ISO 13485, CAPA, complaint handling, supplier management, ISO 14971 risk management.
• Quality leadership (teams of 10–23) and plant management (a $65M, 120+ employee operation).
• ASQ Certified Manager of Quality / Organizational Excellence (CMQ/OE), held 2008–2020.
• 50+ Kaizen events led; Lean / Toyota Kata coaching; 8D problem-solving on critical product issues.

Measured results (the kind an auditor would ask to see)

• Nonconformance rate reduced from 10% to 2.5% at one medical-device manufacturer, and by 46% at another.
• Equipment availability improved from 40% to 85%; on-time delivery from 91% to 99.8%.
• Profit improvement of ~$500K/month from operational turnaround work.

Why this tool exists

Most CAPAs are not audit-ready — not because teams don't care, but because the elements reviewers look for (verified causes, ruled-out alternatives, evidence citations, real effectiveness checks) take senior quality-engineering experience most organizations can't keep on staff. And generic AI chatbots make it worse in documented ways: they agree with your pet theory, invent plausible-sounding causes, collapse multi-factor problems into one tidy answer, and blame the operator.

The Root Cause Analyzer encodes the discipline an experienced quality engineer would insist on — as enforced gates, not suggestions: evidence before conclusions, at least two competing hypotheses, counter-evidence solicited before anything is confirmed, IS/IS-NOT before 5-Why, a named escape point, and "operator error" never accepted as a root cause without asking what allowed it.

What it is not: it is a decision-support aid, not the investigator of record. The analysis is only as good as the information you provide, and a qualified person in your organization reviews and approves every output before it is used. (That's not fine print — it's how root cause analysis is supposed to work.)

See it before you trust it

The same real investigation, produced in all five output tiers, is public — no signup:

View the sample reports Run your own investigation — free

Fae Intelligence also offers quality-systems and AI-implementation consulting — see faeintelligence.com. Questions: rsnyder@faeintelligence.com · How we handle your data · Privacy · Terms