A Failure Prevention, Problem Prevention and Defect Elimination Strategy
If you want to drastically reduce maintenance costs, stop lost production, eradicate unplanned outages and equipment breakdowns, you need to stop the continual introduction of defects and errors into your operation.
You do that by using quality management practices to drive continuous improvement of your management systems and so continuously improve your peoples' knowledge.
Abstract:
Defect Elimination Strategy. To reduce maintenance costs and production downtime
it is necessary to reduce the causes of the maintenance and downtime. Both
maintenance and downtime are an effect and not a cause. The causes can be
traced back to defects and errors from a variety of sources. Knowing that
defects eventually lead to future equipment failures, production downtime and
lost profits, it is necessary put strategies into place to purposely prevent
them occurring in the first place and to eliminate them if they are present.
Keywords: defect elimination, fault cause analysis, root cause failure analysis
All equipment starts life new.
It comes from the manufacturer fresh. If you do nothing about controlling them,
it also comes with future failures built into it.
These future failures are the
design errors, the materials selection errors, the fabrication errors, the
assembly errors and any transportation damage. When installed, further causes
of future failures arise from incorrect installation, incorrect site assembly,
incorrect mounting practices, inadequate environmental protection and deficient
foundations/supports.
Some of these errors, along with
commissioning errors and operating errors, cause failures early in the
equipment’s operating life and explain early-life or ‘infant mortality’
failures. Those defects and errors that do not appear during equipment infant-life will
eventually surface and cause failures sometime later, during its operating life.
The preferred terminology is to
call the errors ‘defects’, because that is what you see as a consequence of the
mistake. But the truth is that a wrong action (or no action) was taken at some point in time and as a consequence a defect resulted. Another truth is that most times, most things go right. Failure is
not the normal situation. The problems with failures isn't the failure itself. It is the consequences
resulting from them. When the consequences of failure are bad, you want to do
everything possible to never let them happen!
Defect Elimination
Starting from new, a part
properly built and installed, without any errors, will operate at a particular
level of performance. If looked after properly it should, ideally, deliver its
design requirements all its operating life.
As its operating life progresses any
of those previously hidden manufacturer’s and installer’s errors noted above start
to make their effects shown. For some reason the equipment starts to fail.
Failure causes can be introduced at anytime. They can appear during operation from
management decision errors, operating errors, repair errors, abuse and even
acts of Mother Nature.
If you want superbly reliable
equipment you must prevent the introduction of defects and errors at all stages
of equipment life and also act to remove the defects and errors already present
in it. By getting rid of the defects that generate future failures, you will
greatly reduce your future maintenance requirements, and hence guarantee great production performance.
An average item of equipment has several
dozen direct and consequential failure modes.
The best maintenance strategy to
adopt is to not allow failure modes into the equipment from the start. Such
strategies require that you put in place management controls and quality standards
that must be followed to detect, control and stop the introduction of errors and
defects into the equipment.
For example a wise strategy at
the design stage is to look for every failure mode possible and remove it while
on the drawing board. You take each part of the equipment, assembly by assembly, component by component and list its possible defects and errors and then introduced strategies and plans to address every one of those failure paths in the design.
A spreadsheet can be developed of all component and assembly failure modes and this becomes a check sheet to assess all future equipment purchases and designs. It also identifies where you should use preventative and planned replacement maintenance strategies. Some people call this RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance). But I call it just plain common sense!
Figures 1 highlights where most failure casing defects and errors come from and explains that eventually you will have so many problems in your operation that your bucket overflows and you drown in strife!
Maintenance is used to address the effects of the continually growing number of defects. You will often hear people say 'well add another PM into the system', hoping that it will prevent the problem in future. But all they have done is add more cost and resources requirements into the production costs! More maintenance is not the answer - it is just more expense.
Maintenance can only act to 'drain away' the impact of defects. It hides and masks their effect. But it cannot remove them because maintenance only replaces like-for-like. The original defect remains.
You now have an equipment defect model that explains why there is so much crisis and 'fire-fighting' by maintenance crews. Doing maintenance does not fix problems, it can only rejuvenate equipment. If the cause of the problem is not removed ... it remains to reappear again in future.
Figure 2 shows how maintenance can only act to 'keep your head above water' by addressing the impact of defects. As you introduce more defects into the business, so must you increase the size of your maintenance crew and maintenance resources to deal with them.
A Simple Defect Elimination Process
Only by intentionally reducing the size and quantity of defects entering your operation will you be able to reduce the maintenance you now need to do to stop defects from flooding and drowning you out of business.
Each of the defect categories need to be addressed systematically. Effective mechanisms must be introduced by you to combat and defeat the cause of the defects. Unless the causes are
controlled and stopped you will be continually battling failures.
Defects will never stop, unless you act to stop them! They are forever being introduced and perpetuated by poor procedures and practices, poor quality control and poor management systems. Unless you purposefully act to stop defect introduction, every new piece of equipment, every new part, every new person that joins your company bring with them defects and errors, to one day cause future failures. How catastrophic those failures will be will depend on the internal controls you have in place in your organisation to prevent and control them.
You have to intentionally, proactively, with the future well-being of your business in mind ... put into place a strategy to eliminate and eradicate your defects forever!
This logic is sound and sensible - get rid of the defects causing the problems, so that you can reduce the amount of maintenance you need to do, because you now have less defects to address. That way you get both lower maintenance costs and more production!.
Figure 3 shows you that when you reduce the number of defects entering your operation you can also reduce the amount of maintenance you need to do.
Here is an easy, simple and powerful model to guide you in removing the equipment defects you have in your operation.
1)
Select one failure and identify where defects and errors were first introduced
through the use of root cause failure analysis.
2)
Use resources skilled at eliminating the root cause and action a plan to
engineer-out the causes forever. (I implore you not to use work procedures to control
engineering failures. If you do that you will soon run out of people in the
company to make responsible for controlling the causes you will find. They
will also consider it an impost on their job and sub-consciously lower its
importance so they do nothing about it and the failure will repeat. Use work
procedures to direct people’s attention, not to compensate for equipment defects.)
3)
Introduce clear, written quality production and engineering standards into
the appropriate levels and locations in the organisation that contain checks
and tests to prevent the defects from again entering into your company.
4)
Train and re-train your people to meet the new standards.
5)
Measure their performance against the new standards.
6)
Repeat the above until the defects are so few that your operation is the
world-class leader in your industry.
It is necessary to use a quality
system because a quality system is self-improving, self-correcting and self-developing.
With a quality system properly applied, your company will continuously improve
because continuous improvement is built into the way you do business. Without a
working quality system you require individuals to remember to do the right
things every time. This approach means that you are counting on a lot of good luck for things
to go right!
You can remove defects and stop
failures by taking a personal stand and start introducing the right quality
management practices into your operation, especially in your own personal work.
Only by you adopting better systems and methods, and causing the introduction
of better practices and standards at every stage of the production, engineering
and maintenance process, will you ever reduce the equipment failures in your
operation.
If you want to master equipment maintenance
and have outstandingly reliable production, you must stop the introduction of
defects and errors into your operation! If you want to seriously reduce
maintenance costs then reduce the number of ways your equipment can randomly
fail.
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