TRC-2019 Learning Session 48:45 minutes

by John Reeve, EDI

Failure mode is the language of RCM. Unfortunately, it is not the language of your CMMS.

The failure mode identifies the component that failed. This is what the maintenance technician repaired or replaced. If we had that level of detail available for analysis, we could trend the number of times this exact failure occurred. And that information would be quite useful as we could then focus on the worst offenders to reduce reactive maintenance.

The RCM standard, SAE JA1011/1012 describes failure mode in sentence format, such as “(the) bearing failed due to lack of lubrication.” So, if we focus on the words “bearing,” “failed,” “lack of lubrication” then we have 3 distinct segments. By having actionable fields then the database analyst can do the following: (1) validate these failure data entries to eliminate spelling errors, (2) run group-by commands for Pareto analysis, and, (3) run SQL join statements to compare values between tables.

Synchronizing failure data for better decision making.

By capturing failure mode on the work order and storing RCM analysis results inside the CMMS, we can synchronize on failure mode. This design strategy then helps the reliability engineer ask questions like: Why did this functional failure occur for this asset if we already had a proper maintenance strategy? Why is this work order failure mode missing from the RCM failure mode application when they already did an RCM analysis? [he would ask] Is the suggested maintenance tactic incorrect? Did the asset manager fail to properly setup the CMMS PM application to activate the RCM maintenance tactic? Was the PM-work order record skipped when it was due? Was the PM instruction not followed properly? When the software and data are all in one place, we have a foundation for improvement.