The snowball effect

After spending years in the quality field, I find every problem starts small then gets bigger. Problems tend to have a snowball effect!

People tend to see only the bigger problems and choose to ignore the smaller problems. That is why when a quality problem first appears, some times quality personnel choose not to do anything about it. Well, this act of taking no action leads to a bigger problem that shows up downstream long after the initial problem was reported (snowball effect).
Now the problem is much bigger to handle and results in a crisis. Coming out of crisis takes longer with a larger price tag. Quality problems that cause warranty claims, product recalls, customer complaints, sorting, rework are costly and may cause poor reputation in the market. The real root cause of these problems may be well before they surfaced.
If these root causes were identified as soon as the problem was seen the first time,
they would get fixed much faster. Companies who choose not the take action on a problem now will have to face the problem on a larger scale later.