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Your equipment can't talk back, but your people can and should.
Industry has done a very good job at determining how to fix equipment to keep it up and running. And yet, how often do we look at a failed piece of equipment or equipment that has never worked quite right and:
* blame the manufacturer for the problems
* tell people it has always worked that way (problem? what problem?)
* assume someone else will fix it (operations or maintenance)
* ask Mr. Machinery to fix it (the person who has been around for 30 years)
As we all knew, the equipment can't talk back. We may not take the time to conduct a thorough troubleshooting and failure analysis effort to determine the actual path to failure and identify human performance issues and root causes of our equipment problems.
By knowing how to determine the failure mode, failure agent, and failure classification, the professional troubleshooter can do a better job of collecting necessary information that will help perform better root cause failure analysis and subsequently identify the real human performance root causes that often are the underlying reasons causing equipment problem(s). When the real reasons for the equipment problems are known, the professional troubleshooter can recommend and implement corrective actions that will prevent further similar problems and allow increased mean time between failures.
Objectives and Traps
Most people recognize the primary objective of conducting machinery troubleshooting is to prevent the equipment and machinery from repeat incidents. Although this may sound obvious, I suggest we might not be as effective at accomplishing this as desired. One of the reasons may be that in our troubleshooting efforts, we don't always take the time to document our efforts. As a result, when we have a failure and we review the machinery history for the equipment or machinery, the entry looks something like the following:
3-25-01-Compressor failed
3-26-01-Compressor online
Unfortunately, this does not indicate what was done during the troubleshooting process and whether actions that were taken were effective or ineffective. A process that makes the documentation easier while conducting the troubleshooting is a desired goal. Additionally, if a decision is made to purchase a new piece of equipment or upgrade an existing piece, it is beneficial...