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Reliability Tip:
Failure Reporting Process Based on FMEAs
Organizations striving towards excellence in maintenance and reliability use metrics to compare their performance to best in class. These activities are valuable provided they are clearly understood and acted upon. I will not list the myriad of metrics/KPIs and discuss the applicability to every aspect of maintenance and reliability; rather, I will focus on the care and feeding of one activity that should be on the top of the list.
We all know that the consequence of failure varies depending on the equipment’s function and criticality, which includes costs, downtime impact, environmental and safety impact, etc. These considerations should drive the level of mitigating tasks, such as PM versus PdM, frequency of tasks, etc. As part of a continuous improvement posture, we should focus on the failures that do occur and act to prevent future failures. The best way to quickly categorize and retrieve information about what went wrong is through a comprehensive Failure Reporting process based on FMEAs that identify the problem, cause, and remedy as corrective action work orders are closed out.
Most CMMS/EAM systems contain the functionality to support Failure Reporting, but in truth Failure Reporting is only half of a common process referred to as FRACAS (Failure Reporting, Analysis, and Corrective Actions System). Identifying the predominant problem, cause, and remedy is a key source of information; however, the analysis and corrective action cannot be automated in most cases. This requires reliability engineers and maintenance professionals to actually ANALYZE the reporting information and act upon this information with a CORRECTIVE ACTION system.
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