Developing Failure Codes with Bill Leahy

Failures codes help the reliability engineers to make intelligent business decisions regarding the issues with the assets. It is a formula that helps you understand how an asset fails and how can you gather the needed data to mitigate a failure? A good failure code contains a hierarchy of the problem towards a suitable solution. The best practice to devise a failure code would be to break it into a sequence of Part, Problem, and Cause. In short, failure codes help you describe and understand the problem based on the failure data, and you can trend that data to prevent those failures in the future.

There are systematic problems that should also be taken care of while designing failure codes. There should be generic lists of failure codes in place to see the details such as the operating context of the system so that everyone can make the best decision accordingly. These lists should contain the vulnerable parts of the system that can fail and the possible causes of the failure. Root Cause Analysis helps greats in developing the failure codes using a good approach.

Once you have understood how the failure codes should be developed, you can bring in the team and ask for their help in developing the failures codes and improving them over the period. Each team members should be able to pitch in so that the details can be made a part of the failure code. The experienced personnel and their knowledge about the history of failures is a big input source towards understanding the ways of failure. ISO 14224 can provide with the relevant information that you need. RCM also helps you use a derivative approach to find out how an asset can fail.

You can then use FMEA to understand the operating context where ISO 14224 falls behind. You can use these guides to find an asset class, then the component class, and find the failure codes that will help you solve the problem in a library fashion. There should be instant failure codes in place regarding the components that fail repeatedly. For example, there should be different ways of handling pump failures and instant fixes to prevent it from further damage to the machine.

All of these standard procedures and the failure codes should be implemented in a systemic approach so that everyone understands the criticality of the failures in an asset and their causes. Once everyone has understood this fact, then the team can write down all the possible asset classes, components, failures, and all the possible causes. Everyone should go through that generic list, understand it, and then be able to fix a problem promptly. Over the period, you can improve and build upon that failure code list, and reserve certain resources to carry out what needs to be done. The management should facilitate the team, and the engineers should spend as much time as they can, on the floor.

Eruditio Links:

• Eruditio
• HP Reliability
• James Kovacevic’s LinkedIn
• 23 – Failure Data and the CMMS with John Reeve
• Reliability Report

Bill Leahy Links:

• Bill Leahy’s LinkedIn
• Failure Modes to Failure Codes by John Reeve
• RCM2 by John Moubray
• 103 – Leadership with Bill Leahy
• 110 – Laws of Leadership with Bill Leahy
• Brene Brown Books
• Email Bill Leahy

142 – Developing Failure Codes with Bill LeahyJames Kovacevic

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