Reliability issues

I often get questions that sound something like this…
“I’ve been trying to sift through the bewildering amount of information out there on equipment reliability. Is there a “relatively simple” method that lends itself toward machine reliability issues?”
In other words, is there a simple method available that will make my machinery more reliable?

That’s a pretty tall order. There are many directions you can go, and you really need to narrow down your area of concern. Are you looking for:

– Predictive Maintenance capabilities
– Theory behind equipment failures (Weibull curves, etc)
– Equipment Troubleshooting aids
– Root Cause Analysis
– Etc, etc, etc

I can definitely help with the root cause analysis problems prevalent in industry today. I facilitate companies throughout the country on accident root cause analysis, and I see equipment reliability and failure issues all the time. More often than not, I see companies that do an adequate job of applying predictive maintenance techniques to track when a piece of gear is failing, but they rarely try to find out why it is failing. That is until a catastrophic failure forces them to perform a root cause analysis of the incident.

I do not feel that equipment troubleshooting and root cause analysis should be separated. If you are troubleshooting your equipment, it means you had a failure of some type. Are you satisfied with repairing the symptom and putting it back in service, or do you want to find out why you are troubleshooting in the first place? The same problem is almost guaranteed to happen again unless the actual cause of the failure is discovered and corrected. This goes to the heart of equipment reliability issues in almost every industry segment.

Using Equifactor® Troubleshooting in combination with the rest of the TapRooT® System will provide you with a method of looking beyond mere symptom correction. The combination of a systematic troubleshooting tool with a world-class root cause analysis system provides an extremely effective yet easy-to-use tool for finding out why your equipment fails.

Don’t be satisfied with finding and correcting symptoms. Use Equifactor(R) to define the problems with your equipment, then apply TapRooT® RCA to find out why you have the problem in the first place.