At Amazon, the Correction of Error (COE) process is a structured, scalable tool designed to ensure that customer-impacting problems are not only fixed, but truly understood. Here’s a template any company can use:
Most companies will execute “post-mortems”—focusing on addressing symptoms. In contrast, Amazon’s COE framework insists on identifying and eliminating root causes.
The approach is grounded in one of Amazon’s core beliefs: Defects are inevitable, but allowing them to persist is a choice.
Here’s how the process works:
Step 1: Clearly define the problem and quantify its impact on customers and the business.
Step 2: Use root cause analysis—typically the “Five Whys” method—to drill down until you’ve uncovered the true source of the issue.
For example, if a package doesn’t arrive on time, the “Five Whys” works like this:
→ Why? Because Dayton Freight delivered the package to FedEx 2 hours after the cut-off time.
→ Why? Because the Dayton Freight truck left our dock 4 hours late.
→ Why? Because our picking team was 5 hours delayed.
→ Why? Because we had 30 pickers on the floor but needed 40 to complete the wave.
→ Why? Because we didn’t anticipate the spike in demand for products x, y, and z.
Step 3: Implement corrective actions that *address the root*, not just the symptom. In the example above, this would be implementing a process to more reliably forecast demand and plan labor. Refunding the customer who got their package late is a band-aid not a cure.
Step 4: Document and share the lessons learned—both the missteps and what the team did well.
The most important part is then sharing the COE learnings across the organization. Amazon’s culture encourages surfacing errors with transparency so that the company as a whole can build stronger systems by learning from individual errors.
The idea is that the whole organization learns from everyone’s mistakes.
Visit this page on our website for a COE example (https://lnkd.in/gATUaj8B) and template (https://lnkd.in/gwFsWtMj).
