Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
As we all have learned, eliminating defects is the key to a safe and profitable plant. But how do we know where our ‘bugs” are hiding? There are certainly many ways to uncover where the bugs are, but one place in particular is your computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) or enterprise asset management system (EAM), as it is commonly referred.
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Have you ever noticed how much emphasis is put on the maintenance budget in an industrial facility? While maintenance cost is usually just a fraction of what is spent on other costs like raw materials, energy costs and other input costs, it get 95% of the attention. This is because many think that every dollar spent on maintenance is a wasted dollar. With this attitude, it causes those at the plant level to make extremely difficult decisions of cost versus risk. The lower the budget, the more risk has to be taken.
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If you are like most people who work in a manufacturing or process plant, you have a plan for your day when you arrive in the morning. As soon as you walk through the gate, you are hit with the equipment failures from the night before. You immediately spring into action to help find parts, drawings, millwrights, fitters and anything else needed to get the equipment repaired as quickly as possible. Once that is underway you are told to compile that urgent report for corporate that is needed immediately. And who can forget the countless meetings that must have your attendance. The next thing you know, it is 7:00 PM and you have done nothing from the plan you had for your day. Sound familiar?
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I am often asked if there is a relationship between improved reliability and safety? There is certainly anecdotal evidence that suggests that there is a link. I’m sure anyone reading this can attest to similar beliefs from their work environment. But I was particularly interested to see if there was more definitive research that can back up these beliefs with hard data. I was able to find numerous articles that provided additional support data. However, I saw one from Ron Moore that really stood out to me. Ron has been a respected Reliability practitioner and consultant for many years. This article, which is posted all over the internet, shows more than just anecdotal conclusions on this relationship. Ron presents are a clear mathematical relationship that shows us that being more proactive and reliable also makes us safer.
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The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has created immense excitement and promise for industrial facilities. Having connected assets that continuously monitor their own health and feed that information back in a way that is timely and actionable will drive business outcomes and help organizations achieve loftier goals. The challenge today is that many of our assets are not yet “connected” or “intelligent,” meaning that they are not yet outfitted with the health monitoring instrumentation that provides the live, automated data feed directly to a centralized repository of data. Yes, critical assets like turbine generators, boiler feed water pumps, highly critical motors and the like are indeed outfitted with modern instrumentation and fail-safe solutions. However, in most industrial facilities throughout the world, this is a very small population of assets.
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Have you ever thought about all the many elements of a successful maintenance/reliability initiative? It is the alphabet soup of acronyms. RCA, RCM, FMEA, ODR, CMMS, EAM, BOM, KPI, MRO, PdM, PM, IIoT … The list goes on and on. The problem is that while many of these elements are critical to implementing a successful asset performance management (APM) initiative, it is overwhelming for those tasked with doing it at the plant level. There is a tendency to want to apply all these tools and technologies to all areas of the plant at the same time.
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Most associate the traditional application of RCA, with some type of undesirable outcome, that has exceeded a set threshold or trigger. It is at this point that a formal RCA process will be set into motion. Because of its serious nature, it will likely have the attention and support of leadership. It may also have the attention of external stakeholders like OEM’s, insurance companies and regulators. As a career ‘RCA’ professional, I must say that this traditional perception unfortunately is the norm, and not the exception in my 35+ years in this space. This is unfortunate because it suppresses the methodology’s potential, and the capability of applying a more holistic approach to preventing such undesirable outcomes in the first place. In this article my intent is to provide a different perspective of how to view ‘RCA’ in a much broader and meaningful context and coupling its use with an effective Defect Elimination (DE) strategy. While most are familiar with hindsight-based RCA, we will explore the emergence of foresight approaches as well. We will also contrast these perspectives in an effort to truly understand WHY we even do RCA, and is it worthwhile?
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The utility had an excellent opportunity to implement a green initiative. Energy could be created from excess digester gas at the wastewater treatment plant. There seemed to be a full range of feasible options after an engineering analysis.
“We can convert the gas and use it to either heat the building or reuse it to make the wastewater treatment process more efficient,” explained the chief engineer. “it is a 10- to 15-year payback, but the regulators love it so it is easy to get approved. It will buy us some goodwill too.”
“Can we reduce the payback if we sell the energy to the electric grid?” asked the chief financial officer.
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Properly conducted RCAs are time and resource consuming, so when we are not getting the expected ROI’s from our efforts, we have to consider why are we wasting so much money doing the same thing over and over again? This article will focus on the commercial and process aspects of RCA, that can take away from their effectiveness on the corporate bottom-line and impact the safety of our co-workers.
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It is easy to get caught in this trap. After months of working on an issue, you are asked to provide an informational update to a group of senior decision makers. You understand that no decision will come from your presentation. And there is not much on the agenda, so you are free to make as much as 30 minutes to provide your update.
Your presentation can be a little less formal and use the entire time, right? Wrong.
Does procedural and/or regulatory compliance with RCA guidelines ensure Operational Reliability? Does it ensure improved Safety? Operational Reliability involves the aggregation of Equipment, Process and Human Reliability methods and techniques.
What is the difference between troubleshooting, problem solving and ‘RCA’? Are the outcomes different when we use The 5-Whys, The Fishbone or a Logic Tree/Causal Factor Type Tree?
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The Board of Adjustment was having a hard time making a decision. The property owner’s new woodworking shop extends six feet into the required side-lot setback. Even worse, it blocks the scenic view of the neighbor, who paid a premium for the lot.
“So, whose fault is it that the building was built in the wrong place,” asked the board chairman. “Clearly, it was shown on the approved drawing in the right place.”
“I am still trying to figure it out, “replied the property owner.” I hired the best surveyor in town and one of the best contractors. I know it will cost me over $30,000 to move it over six feet. I paid a premium to make it look good like my house, and I am afraid it will look worse after the move. And I don’t have the $30,000 to move it.”
In rebuttal, the neighbor explained, “right is right.” The building location violated the town’s planning and zoning codes. The correct location had been formally approved by town staff, and there was no relief they could provide because this was clearly wrong. Leaving the building in the wrong place would devalue his property much more than $30,000. If the Board of Adjustment did not uphold the ordinance, he would be the victim of something he had no control over.
The comment is a common one.
“It does not surprise me that they do not want to save $60,000,” quipped the second-in-command of the electrical department. “They are more concerned with being popular and helping their friends.”
“By ‘they,’ I assume you mean the Board and me as the interim Town Manager?” I asked.“Well, not really you, but them – yes,” came a frustrated response.
I decided to move to a more productive line of discussion.
In recent years, “Defect Elimination” has become a hot topic in the reliability world. But what exactly does defect elimination mean? How does it differ from other maintenance practices? Is it more than just a new way to describe planned and predictive maintenance? This article will seek to answer these questions in a very practical manner.
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From a holistic RCA perspective…
“What are the top 5 keys to focus on when trying to change a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) culture from one of a reaction to proaction?”
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