When organizations experience failures in their facilities, they face expensive equipment repairs, production losses, and decreased reliability. To prevent repeat failures, companies use a variety of screening tools, such as Root Cause Analyses (RCAs) and Root Cause Failure Analyses (RCFAs), to identify smaller, less complex failures, while using trigger criteria to focus high value resources on potential failures with large financial consequences.
Fully and accurately identifying the root causes of failures is integral to managing risks, reducing human error, and identifying which assets are contributing to lost profit opportunities. Failure Elimination is designed to weed out bad actors in terms of equipment repairs, production losses, and overall reliability impact. It utilizes a Pareto Analysis to drive the most impactful bad actors out of an organizational culture. To address Failure Elimination within our OESuite® software, we employ an 8-step process (see Figure 1).
Figure 1 – OESuite® Failure Elimination Process
For asset-intensive industries, human error typically causes 60-70% of events that lead to production losses. As a result, significant production improvements can be made by successfully tackling human error. Today, companies are shifting their Failure Elimination processes to rely on strategy libraries with generic failure codes that ultimately link back to equipment classes and operation modes.
OESuite® uses this information to correctly define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and roll it up to define control actions through the Failure Elimination / Bad Actors Feature. The Failure Elimination / Bad Actors Feature is built to compare the effectiveness of their asset strategies to actual performance. Production loss events, equipment failure, process interruptions, and safety incidents are collected and analyzed and subjected to further root cause examination.
In the end, Failure Elimination done right will greatly reduce equipment downtime, off-spec product, safety incidents, and environmental excursions – all of that requires the right technology and contributes to value protection and value extraction.