root cause Archives

by Christopher Jackson Leave a Comment

The Root Cause of a Failure is Always a Decision

We often get sucked into drawn-out conversations (or heated debates) about the ‘true’ meaning of words. Especially when it comes to sports. Was James Harden (a basketball player) in the ‘act of shooting’ when he was fouled? It matters – because if the answer is ‘yes’ he gets up to three free throws. So what does the ‘act of shooting’ mean and who decides it? There will be endless debate over beers about what this means. Perhaps largely dependent on which team you support.

At the end of the day, it usually doesn’t matter. You can debate it as much as you want, but the referees have already decided what happened on the court. It is done. It is over. You can disagree with them. But nothing changes the score. [Read more…]

by Bryan Christiansen 1 Comment

How To Use CMMS To Supplement Root Cause Analysis

According to the American Society of Quality (ASQ), a root cause is defined as “A factor that caused a nonconformance and should be permanently eliminated through process improvement. The root cause is the core issue—the highest-level cause—that sets in motion the entire cause-and-effect reaction that ultimately leads to the problem(s).”

As most of you already know, Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a systematic process for identifying the origins, or root cause, of problems and determining an approach to minimize or eliminate their risk of recurrence. It focuses on preventing problems at the source rather than resorting to a firefighting approach and being reactive every time. RCA tries to be more scientific about asset failures, going one step beyond troubleshooting. [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

Root Cause Analysis: The Key To Breaking The Reactive Cycle

Addressing The Root Cause Of Failures Will Unlock The Potential Of The Business

You walk into the plant on Monday morning. You are immediately confront by the production manager stating “Press 201 is down. The mechanics are saying it is the clutch again.” You feel an overwhelming sense disbelief. You ran overtime last weekend and replaced clutch at a cost of $30,000. How is it the clutch is failing again?

This scenario may sound familiar. It happens all the time, across many different industries and plants. So what exactly happened? The root cause was not properly diagnosed, and the clutch was replaced. Based on the short life of the new clutch, the root cause was likely something else that is affecting the clutch. [Read more…]

by Kirk Gray Leave a Comment

When Smart TV Content Delivery Fails, Who is to Blame?

A Crisis in the Home IT department

If you are the head of your home IT department, you may relate to this tale

Last night my wonderful wife Stacy was riddled with angst over the disruption of her binge watching a spy series, a mild crisis with our own IT hardware.

The cause of her disappointment was the failure of our new large screen Ultra High Definition (UHD) Smart TV to deliver a drama series with a reasonable picture and sound quality. [Read more…]

by Kirk Gray 4 Comments

No Evidence of Correlation: Field failures and Traditional Reliability Engineering

Historically Reliability Engineering of Electronics has been dominated by the belief that 1) The life or percentage of complex hardware failures that occurs over time can be estimated, predicted, or modeled and 2) Reliability of electronic systems can be calculated or estimated through statistical and probabilistic methods to improve hardware reliability. The amazing thing about this is that during the many decades that reliabilityengineers have been taught this and believe that this is true, there is little if any empirical field data from the vast majority of verified failures that shows any correlation with calculated predictions of failure rates.
[Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

Failure Analysis: The Key to Learning From Failure

Why do so many avoid failure?

In product development of plant asset management, we are surrounded by people that steadfastly do not want to know about or talk about failures.

Failure does happen. Let’s not ignore this simple fact. [Read more…]

by Richard Coronado 3 Comments

FRACAS

The Failure Reporting and Corrective Action System (FRACAS) is a closed-loop process whose purpose is to provide a systematic way to report, organize and analyze failure data. Implementation of a FRACAS has increasingly become commonplace within an industry. The requirement for implementation of some type of FRACAS within a DoD program was first established in 1985 with MIL-STD-2155. However, in 1995 that standard was reestablished with no changes to content as a handbook, MIL-HDBK-2155, and was recommended as guidance. Today, multiple software solutions exist that provide all the functionality required of a FRACAS. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 1 Comment

Root Cause Knowledge and Models

Two short questions to evaluate your knowledge of failure mechanisms (root causes) and common reliability models. The answers will be posted in a comment, later.

Which of the following failure root causes is most likely NOT due to power line variation (electronic-based product)?

A. Circuit design margin exceeded
B. Power dissipation
C. In-rush current response
D. Mechanical fatigue [Read more…]