What your diagnostic report looks like
This is a complete sample report, generated automatically from a 10-minute questionnaire. Yours follows the same structure using your own answers, and you can download it as a PDF.
The example business
Business: Independent bakery and café, 5 staff
Problem: Best-selling items run out before the mid-morning rush, so customers are turned away and sales are lost to the café two doors down.
Impact: Roughly 12–15 lost sales each week and regulars are starting to shop elsewhere.
whyfound
Business problem diagnostic report
Likely root cause: Process / Workflow
Your stock-outs are almost certainly a process problem, not a capacity or supplier problem.
Root cause
There is no simple, daily process for checking what is on hand and deciding what to bake or order before the day starts.
Based on your answers, the strongest signal points to process / workflow. You are running out of the same products because there is no repeatable opening stock check and no reorder trigger. The fix is a small, free routine, not more stock or a new system.
How this was worked out: You gave a detailed description, so a full five-level 5 Whys chain was run to drill to the underlying cause. Because several cause areas scored highly, an Ishikawa (fishbone) breakdown groups the possible causes by People, Process, Tools, Inputs, Measurement and Environment. A Pareto analysis then ranks those areas so you can see the vital few causing most of the problem.
5 Whys chain
Why 1: Why is this happening?
Because we do not know an item is low until a customer asks for it.
Why 2: Why is that?
Because we do not do a daily stock check before the morning rush.
Why 3: Why is that?
Because nobody is assigned to it and there is no checklist.
Why 4: Why is that?
Because the opening routine was never written down.
Why 5: Why is that?
Because the process grew informally as the business got busier.
Underlying cause
The opening stock check was never made part of the daily routine, so low stock is only noticed when a sale is lost.
Confidence: high
Ishikawa (fishbone) cause breakdown
Process / Method
- • No daily opening stock check
- • No par level or reorder trigger
- • Ordering is based on a rough guess rather than actual stock
People
- • Nobody owns the stock check each morning
- • The owner does it when they remember, but staff are not sure whose job it is
Measurement
- • No live count of top sellers before the day starts
- • Waste and sales are not tracked against each other
Pareto analysis — the vital few
Three of the five cause areas account for most of the signal. The biggest is process / workflow, so start there; the rest are minor until the daily routine is in place.
Score breakdown
Recommended actions
- 1Do a 5-minute opening stock check every day: count the top 5 selling items and mark what is low.
- 2Set par levels (e.g. 20 croissants, 12 sourdough loaves) and a reorder trigger when stock drops below that level.
- 3Create a one-page stock sheet that lives by the oven or prep area so the same person can act on it even if you are not in.
- 4Review waste for two weeks against the stock sheet to fine-tune the par levels without guessing.
Want help implementing this?
Want help turning this into a simple daily routine that actually sticks? Book a 1:1 root-cause session.
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Session lengths are determined by the complexity of the case. Initial call approximately 1 hour.
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