The Root Cause Analysis For RCM

 

In search of excellence, organizations must never cease to strive to have an improvement in assets and processes – a secrete to remain competitive in the ever-changing environment. Owing to avoid dealing with the recurring problem one must ensure that the real cause of the fault is identified and rectified to prevent it from happening again in foreseeable future rather than fixing only the symptoms of the problem.

With technological advancement, assets/systems/equipment are getting more complex, and so does their problems – and achieving world-class levels of success in the field of maintenance, reliability, and asset management requires to have a strategic and tactical plan for identifying the root cause of a problem or non-conformance of standard operations and removing them altogether in order to prevent it arising again is the crux of RCA – a vital problem-solving tool in the process of improving equipment reliability and performance – Although corrective initially but once its corrective measures are implemented it becomes the proactive process that helps in predicting future problems and preventing it from happening again.

The process of Root Cause Analysis is iterative and is considered a part of continuous improvement. RCA mainly focuses on defining the problem, Data collection & evidence, Data Analysis, and Recommendations for preventing the same problem to recur – thence are the vital steps for the effective implementation of RCA.

It’s proved that effective root cause analysis paves the way to improving plant reliability – and that too becomes more effective when this cause and effect of the functional failure make a part of RCM Methodology.

RCM aka Reliability Centered Maintenance is a proactive approach for identifying potential failures of the asset and developing the operational, maintenance, and design strategies to eliminate them or mitigate their consequences to the least level.

RCM and RCA both may have different methodologies and tools to achieve continuous improvement in asset management but despite their differences organizations should understand their underlying intricate similarities – both processes are entwined and bonded by the same founding principle of “cause and effect” – that together they can improve system reliability to tenfold.

This basic-from-core “cause & effect” approach makes them indispensable for each other – both strive to explore the onset of the problem or the origin of failure – one proactively identifies the problem by asking “how many ways this equipment could fail?” and the other reactively address the root cause of the problem only to prevent it from reoccurring.

As discussed earlier that both RCA and RCM use different approaches for the investigation of failure modes owing to achieving operational excellence in the plant, Such as FMEA, FMECA, 5 Whys, Fishbone, logic tree, etc. Techniques of both processes focus on understanding the cause of equipment failure and preventing failures in the future – and yet when we combine RCA with FMEA or FMECA we get significant benefits out of coherent and effective reliability efforts.

Failure Mode and Effect Analysis is the one popular method used in Reliability Centered Maintenance aka RCM to identify the modes of failure of an asset that could happen in its lifespan. It combines proactive, predictive, and condition-based maintenance techniques to deeply analyze the asset functions and their modes of failure, causes, and consequences of each failure along with applying strategies to predict and prevent these failures. On the other hand, RCA has its own investigating tools to identify the primary cause of the problem and the selection of the appropriate tool is crucial to evade misleading results.

Owing to seeking continuous improvement in plant reliability it is imperative for the organizations to link root cause analysis results in the process of FMEA – the outcomes that come from the Root Cause Analysis should be incorporated into the FMEA document in order to get the maximum effectiveness from both processes.

Out of many RCA tools, Cause and Effect Analysis (Fishbone Diagram) is the one analytical tool that is used to determine the most significant issue and provides a systematic way of looking at problems, the causes, and their detrimental effects. It’s a kind of brainstorming session where a team looks for those casual factors that may contribute to causing a failure. The best part of the cause-and-effect diagram is that it tries to include as many factors as it can and group them into main categories – Man, Machine, Material, Method, Policies, Environment, Skills, etc. The result of the cause-and-effect diagram is thorough and organized which can be further analyzed using the FMEA methodology.

Root cause analysis may start after the incident occurs, but its finding and the cause-and-effect outcome become the important ingredient for the commencement of the Reliability Centered Maintenance Program. Using RCM logic to strategize the correct maintenance program as per its criticality is a wise decision – because when teams are gathered to brainstorm and contribute ideas from their cross-functional perspectives allows the teams to see the big picture of the issues.

In a nutshell, RCM and RCA - when working together can result in an effective and more comprehensive map of cause-and-effect analysis that includes all the possible failures, causes, effects, and their preventive actions against each failure - providing a simpler and more cohesive approach to reliability.