Some months ago I did a
Maintenance assessment in a facility, the Maintenance team was very efficient,
with strong skills, and they repaired quickly any breakdown.
One day an auxiliary water
pump failed, due the maintenance team had the training and instructions
needed and the tools and spare parts were in the warehouse, the breakdown was
repaired in less than two hours. An excellent job, they said.
But I didn’t agree with them
because I thought the job was uncompleted; to repair the pump as soon as
possible is important but, Will the pump become fail again?
Not only must the maintenance
team repair the machines, but it has to look into the breakdown causes to avoid the failure
happens again.
So, I recommended them to
implant an RCA (Root Cause Analysis) and train the maintenance team to
performance it.
RCA is a logical sequence of
steps that allow isolating the facts surrounding an event of failure and
determines the best course of action that will resolve the event and ensure
that it isn’t repeated.
An RCA can be as simple as a 5
Whys process, or can be a more complex one to include questions as What
happened?, Where?, When?, What changed?, Who was involved?, Why did it happen? and,
mainly, What is the impact? The process must go with some photos of the
breakdown, the broken parts, and samples of lubricants and coolants.
This process will spend only
some minutes of the maintenance time, so it won’t lose its efficiency, but will
allow making a small investigation to find answers to the two main
questions: Will it happen again? and How can recurrence be prevented?
Including the answer to this
last question in our maintenance program we will avoid downtimes in the future.