Articles tagged with 'Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and Defect Elimination'

Most organisations have some sort of investigation process, ranging from a basic incident report form through to a mature root cause analysis (RCA) process.

We are fascinated by disasters, yet everyday in our workplaces, mini-disasters occur with monotonous regularity. Why should we accept that failure is the norm?

Let's explore some ways in which maintainers and maintenance management can impact on equipment reliability, and some suggestions to improve reliability via better maintenance.

Let's explore the key ways in which operations management can impact on equipment reliability, and offer some practical suggestions to improve reliability.

Let's explore the communal accountabilities that should be considered in the design phase of an asset life cycle, and the roles that different parts of an organisation play to...

Being at the tail end of the operational chain, supply can often bear the brunt of poor decisions made by asset designers, or during operations and maintenance.

Let's discuss some of the practical issues surrounding root cause analysis implementation within organisations, and how to obtain success from these processes.

There is a school of thought, particularly among more highly qualified engineering personnel, that problem solving and root cause analysis is best performed by “experts” in their fields.

A growing number of root cause analysis processes are being supported by software. We need to be careful not to oversell the benefits of software in effective RCA.

Experience tells us that, in practice, there are several barriers that inhibit the success of implementation of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) practices.

As a general rule, we need to be very careful in using punishment as our first and primary response to any safety or reliability incident.

When you are in the reactive maintenance "death spiral", it takes a major change of approach to break out of it - not just fixing the symptoms of bigger...

The 5 Whys technique offers a simple, effective way to uncover the root of an issue. It is best used in troubleshooting and quality-improvement initiatives.

Proper maintenance planning and scheduling is key in keeping component wear-out manageable and predictable. Let's explore what can go wrong if we ignore it.

Let's discuss the issues that can be caused when a management of change procedure is not followed (or in this case, does not exist).

Stopping a root cause analysis at human error, or at the obvious component failure level, is unlikely to prevent future failures.

In this article, we continue our exploration by considering how developments such as big data and predictive analytics are contributing to reliability improvement.

Let's discuss some of the key tools and techniques that can be used to contribute to sound equipment reliability, and where these may be applicable.

Yes, the issue was a problem and, yes, the issue got 'cleaned up', which is the proper initial action. However, the true problem likely still remains.