Programs

Root Cause Analysis

Objective:

Reliability engineering and predictive maintenance have two major objectives: preventing catastrophic failures of critical plant production systems and avoiding deviations from acceptable performance levels that result in personal injury, environmental impact, capacity loss, or poor product quality. Unfortunately, these events will occur no matter how effective the reliability program. Therefore, a viable program also must include a process for fully understanding and correcting the root causes that lead to events having an impact on plant performance.

This course provides a logical approach to problem resolution. The method can be used to accurately define deviations from acceptable performance levels, isolate the root causes of equipment failures, and develop cost-effective corrective actions that prevent recurrence.

Root Cause Analysis provides the concepts needed to effectively perform industrial troubleshooting investigations. It describes the methodology to perform root cause analysis (RCA), one of the hottest topics currently in maintenance engineering. It also includes detailed equipment design and troubleshooting guidelines, which are needed to perform RCA on machinery found in most production facilities.

Contents:

Chapter 1: Introduction

          Maintenance definition and objectives

Maintenance Policies

Failure prevention

Failure analysis and trouble shooting

Chapter 2: Root Cause Analysis

RCA objective

RCA definition

RCA purpose

RCA effectiveness

Personal requirement

When to use RCA?

Why RCA?

RCA Process – PROACT

RCA general principles

RCA a Successful Business Improvement Strategy

Chapter 3: Root Cause Analysis Techniques

          5 whys? Process failure analysis

Cause Mapping

Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA)

Fault tree analysis

Cause and Effect analysis (fishbone analysis)

Sequence of events analysis

Chapter 4: Root Cause Analysis Methodology

          Reporting an incident or problem

Incident classification

Data gathering

Design review

Application / Maintenance review

Observation and measurements

Determining the root cause

Evaluating potential corrective actions

Cost-Benefit analysis

Report and recommendations

Verify corrective action

Appendix

List of abbreviations

Glossary of terms

Cases studies

Activities and workshops:

By the end of the course attendees will be able to:

• Identify common manufacturing errors and deviations
• Understand how to prioritize failure events to analyze, preserve failure data, and order a failure analysis
• Explore systems failure analysis methods and techniques
• Develop and implement effective and efficient root cause analysis programs
• How to make RCA a structured, team based, analytical approach
• Solve plant Problems using a single but accurate techniques
• Calculate the financial impact by solving problem and how to assign cost to failure
• Practice failure modes of common components
• Use RCA as an analytical failure prevention technique
• and more...