What is the difference between a cause and a root cause?

"The operator entered the wrong setting" is a cause, and it is true — but the only thing you can do with it is warn the operator. The root cause is the place that stops the same mistake coming from someone else tomorrow: that the setting could be entered wrongly at all. Asking "why" again opens the gap between the two, and most teams stop after the third question, because the answer becomes uncomfortable. This is why root cause analysis should live attached to the record rather than in a separate document: there should be an unbroken chain from the nonconformity to the analysis and on to the corrective action it raised. SenSight QMS keeps the nonconformity, the analysis and the corrective action on one chain.