Haleon’s Lincoln, Nebraska facility — home to Theraflu, Benefiber, Centrum, and other globally recognized consumer health brands — spent a decade managing root cause analysis on a homegrown Access database. When that system aged out, Reliability Engineer KayLeigh Glebe and Operations Maintenance Planner Corey Tesmer led the search for something better. What they found was a software that didn’t just replace their old process — it spread across departments on its own.

The Problem: A 10-Year-Old Workaround Running Out of Road

Root cause analysis wasn’t new to Haleon’s Lincoln plant. For years, technicians completed what the team called Breakdown Analyses (BDAs) — structured investigations triggered by equipment failures. The earliest version was entirely paper-based: hand-drawn diagrams, written five W’s, manual distribution after completion.

“Doing it on paper’s long. It’s tedious,” says Corey Tesmer, who spent nine years as an electrician and electronic technician before moving into the reliability department. When the paper process moved to a custom Access database, things improved — but only temporarily.

Over ten years, that database aged poorly. It was 32-bit, couldn’t keep pace with modern hardware, and distributing completed RCA reports required significant manual effort. The process still worked, but it was fighting against the team instead of working with them.

“It had not been able to keep up with computers,” Corey explains. “It was a labor-intensive process to distribute those completed forms after they were done. That’s when we started our journey looking for a better method.”

The requirement wasn’t exotic: they needed root cause analysis software that was modern, easy to roll out to hourly technicians, and capable of producing standardized reports their leadership team could trust.

Why Haleon Chose EasyRCA

When KayLeigh and Corey evaluated options, two things stood out immediately about EasyRCA.

The first was usability. “When Corey and I were diving into the software and picking up just on how easy it was to build the RCAs, how quickly we both caught on — I thought, okay, this is going to be an easy thing for us to roll out,” says KayLeigh. “They’re going to get familiar with it very quickly.”

The second was the report output. EasyRCA generates a fully customizable report at the conclusion of every RCA. For Haleon, this became an unexpected organizational win.

“That standardizes the way our breakdowns and RCAs look across the shop,” KayLeigh notes. “It’s been a great selling point with our leadership team. Anyone up to a global level — when something comes out of Lincoln, it all looks the same. Same format, same structure. That’s the professionalism of it.”

What Implementation Actually Looked Like

Haleon didn’t do a big-bang rollout. They started with admin-level training for the reliability team, built their own internal knowledge base, then moved into small group sessions with each shift’s maintenance technicians.

What happened next is the kind of thing implementation plans rarely account for.

“The rumor mill started going,” KayLeigh says. “Suddenly Corey and I had our operations team and our quality team and everybody knocking on our door — ‘So what’s this? What are you doing?'”

Word spread without a mandate. Other departments wanted in.

“It’s gone beyond just our breakdowns,” KayLeigh continues. “Now it’s root cause analysis and troubleshooting across the shop, which I think is really encouraging.”

The adoption made sense given how Haleon approached RCA in the first place. “We don’t have a defined group that does the RCAs. It’s everybody,” Corey explains. “What better person to do the RCA than the technician who was actually there rectifying the situation? We don’t need the game of telephone that happens sometimes where information gets lost.”

That philosophy — putting analysis as close to the failure event as possible — aligned perfectly with EasyRCA’s design. Technicians could pull up the software on the line, document in real time, and develop a working understanding of root cause before the shift ended.

How Haleon Uses EasyRCA’s Data Layer

Corey Tesmer’s background as an electrician and technician gave him a practical lens on data: it only matters if it shows up where people are already looking.

Haleon’s maintenance team runs structured shift turnovers — crossovers where one shift hands off to the next using boards, slides, and task lists. The old system fed into that process. The question was whether EasyRCA could, too.

Using EasyRCA’s webhook capability, Corey built a custom Power BI integration that pulled live task and RCA status data and formatted it to match exactly what technicians were already used to seeing. The transition was invisible to the shop floor.

“There was very little lag between moving from one system to another because the information was being presented the exact same way,” Corey says.

Now, at every shift turnover — multiple times a day — technicians can see which RCAs are pending, which tasks are assigned to them, and which deadlines are approaching. Color coding flags anything getting close to due.

The data layer goes further than task management. Corey uses the extracted historical data to surface repeat offenders — the equipment and failure modes that keep coming back.

“By having the bulk of that data available to be pulled through, we can go down to specific equipment or area levels and find out where we need to spend that extra time, that extra focus,” he explains. “Having that visibility helps drive decisions that are going to prevent future RCAs from being generated in the first place.”

Teams that want this kind of visibility without building a custom integration can use EasyRCA’s native Power BI dashboard, which is available to all customers out of the box.

The Results: What One Year In Actually Looks Like

Haleon is approximately one year into EasyRCA. KayLeigh is direct about what the numbers show so far — and honest about where the real proof is still coming.

“Just right off the bat, the first thing I go to is timeliness,” she says. “We are able to get through our RCAs and our BDA work with our techs in a much more efficient manner. Completion rates and time from start to finish has shortened up.”

The team is now preparing for their first major data review — a deep dive into the full year of RCA data to identify repeat offenders, measure recurrence reduction, and quantify what the corrective action completions have actually prevented.

One story from the first year stands out as a signal of what’s ahead. When one of their electrical technicians got stuck during a troubleshooting situation, he turned to EasyRCA’s AI-assisted analysis feature.

“He didn’t quite know what his next step needed to be,” KayLeigh recalls. “He utilized the tool, it provided him an idea of what it could be, he went down that rabbit hole, and it wound up getting the equipment back up and running sooner.”

That’s a hard metric to capture in a spreadsheet. But for a plant making consumer health products that people depend on daily, faster return-to-run matters — and so does building a technician workforce that knows how to work through a problem rather than wait for one.

What They’d Tell Another Reliability Team

When asked what advice they’d give to a plant considering EasyRCA, both KayLeigh and Corey gave answers that cut to the same truth from different angles.

KayLeigh: “Take the free trial. Use it in place of whatever RCA tool you currently have. I’m a kinesthetic learner — I need to do it. And then dive into understanding how you can pull the data you’re generating and present it out to your company.”

Corey: “Understand what your end goal is. Understand why you need this, why you need it as part of your culture, and what end results you want. For us it was replacing an aging process. But there are all these things we found along the way — increased visibility, standardized format, professionalism. Know the problem you’re solving, and you’ll find the other benefits naturally.”

Their broader advice to the reliability community tracked the same direction: stay curious, trust the data, and use every source of information available before you commit to a cause.

“Trust your gut,” Corey says, “but in reliability, use the information that’s available. You’ll have things you don’t obviously see or overlook. Use the different sources of information to actually drive down to that root cause and solve that problem.”

Key Takeaways

Adoption follows ease of use. If your technicians won’t use the tool, the tool doesn’t exist. Haleon’s organic cross-department adoption was a direct result of how quickly maintenance techs caught on — and word traveling on its own.

Standardized output is a leadership sell. A consistent, professional RCA report format builds credibility at the management level and makes it easier to compare events across shifts, lines, and time periods.

Your data is only as useful as where it lives. Corey’s Power BI integration meant zero disruption to existing shift turnover workflows. Meet people where they are.

Year one is about adoption. Year two is about outcomes. Don’t expect to have all your metrics in month three. Build the culture first, then mine the data.

The technician closest to the failure is your best analyst. Remove barriers to their analysis and you get faster, more accurate root cause identification — without adding meetings or specialized headcount.

Watch the Interview with KayLeigh & Corey

About the Contributors

KayLeigh Glebe — Reliability Engineer, Haleon Lincoln KayLeigh’s career path mirrors how many reliability professionals find their way into the discipline: she started on the process side as a chemical engineer, keeping packaging lines running and leading equipment investigations, before crossing into maintenance and reliability. At Haleon’s Lincoln facility, she leads the plant’s RCA program, owns the reliability function, and was instrumental in evaluating and implementing EasyRCA across the site.

Corey Tesmer — Operations Maintenance Planner, Haleon Lincoln Corey joined Haleon’s Lincoln plant 20 years ago as a packaging equipment operator, then spent nine years in maintenance as an electrician and electronic technician before moving into the reliability department. He managed the plant’s PM program and CMMS before stepping into his current planning role. His background in the trades gives him a practical, floor-level perspective on what reliability tools actually need to do — and how they need to present data — to be useful to the people doing the work.

Haleon is a global consumer healthcare company and manufacturer of brands including Theraflu, Benefiber, Centrum, Gasex, and Polident. Their Lincoln, Nebraska facility uses EasyRCA to support reliability-centered maintenance across manufacturing and packaging operations.

Want to see if EasyRCA is the right fit for your team? Schedule a discovery call today →