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What is equipment failure analysis?
Equipment failure analysis is used to identify possible errors and measure the risks associated with them in a given process. Also known as Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA), this method examines cause-and-effect relationships to develop strategies to prevent these problems.
In maintenance, this means avoiding failures in product or service design, as well as in other stages of manufacturing. After process mapping is performed, for example, the analysis can identify factors that are in a nonconforming condition. Next, improvement proposals are developed so that activities on that machine remain under control and within the expected parameters.
Today, efficiency and availability indicators in operational processes are crucial to the success of any organization. Therefore, adopting this technique in maintenance allows the company to constantly work toward higher asset reliability.
FMEA can be considered one of the main methods covered by risk management. In addition to the benefits mentioned above, it helps reduce costs, both in maintenance and in production processes, improving the final quality of the company’s products and services.
To do so, it must establish a balance between Preventive Maintenance and Corrective Maintenance, as we will detail below.
How to perform an equipment failure analysis?
For an assertive failure analysis, the first step is to organize a team and define the role of each participant. This makes it possible to diversify and broaden the view of processes and failures, combining each team member’s experience and technical knowledge with the organization’s processes and routines and the possible consequences of each failure.
Next, it is necessary to identify the possible failure modes. In this way, you need to analyze the risks of each failure mode, assigning a value on a scale from 1 to 10 to three pillars:
- Severity: How serious is the problem?
- Probability: What is the likelihood of it happening?
- Detectability: What is the likelihood of detecting the failure?
These scores will be assigned from lowest to highest for severity and probability, and from highest to lowest for detectability. Thus, the lower the severity and probability, the better, and the higher the chance of detecting a failure, the better.
How to define a Preventive and Corrective Maintenance methodology?
We know this is an ideal scenario, and every company must be prepared for adverse situations. In this sense, an interesting point of equipment failure analysis is that it helps the team get ready.
Whenever FMEA is put into practice, the result must be an action plan with precise details about what needs to be done. In other words, the analysis should culminate in specific procedures that establish whether the best way to address a given risk is through a Preventive or Corrective Maintenance action.
To do this, a hypothesis must be formulated that encompasses a sequence of events directly or indirectly responsible for that failure. Based on this investigation, preventive and corrective measures are defined.
A failure caused by a lack of equipment calibration, on the other hand, can be addressed with Preventive Maintenance. In this way, the process is put back on track, and a much larger problem is dealt with in advance.
However, it is necessary to carefully evaluate the right time to apply each of these approaches. After all, Corrective Maintenance may mean shutting down the machine and, consequently, delaying production, while scheduling a check for a future date may further increase the risk of greater disruptions.
When should each type of maintenance be applied?
As we showed earlier, equipment failure analysis works as a kind of filter to define the best approach. In practice, it should select only the failure modes of assets for Preventive Maintenance. This will enable the maintenance engineering department to work on the continuous and sustainable improvement of the company’s processes.
To achieve this, this team works with targets, gathering and analyzing data, and collecting trend samples, among other activities.
Through specific methods, such as analyzing the functional failure curve, a graph in a Cartesian plane that shows the relationship between the performance and operating time of a machine, it is possible to identify the intervals between failures and make better predictions about when maintenance should be performed.
Thus, the maintenance department’s ability to follow the developed plan will be directly responsible for increasing production efficiency.
In other words, these are tools that allow maintenance to act precisely to increase process availability and reliability.
How to perform effective Preventive and Corrective Maintenance?
Equipment failure analysis plays an essential role in ensuring the effectiveness of maintenance, both Preventive and Corrective. The key point lies in defining standardized criteria to identify the root cause of a problem.
To guide preventive and corrective actions, it is important to keep three questions in mind:
- How does the proposed action correct the effect (consequence) of the failure?
- How does this action eliminate the root cause of the failure?
- How will this action make it easier to detect a similar or identical failure in the future?
In this way, failure analysis will make it easier to identify risks and will be directly aligned with Preventive Maintenance practices. The result is a more efficient planning and execution cycle, raising the quality standard of interventions.
It is worth noting that technology is an irreplaceable tool for the success of this methodology. Specialized maintenance management software records all events related to assets, generating a rich database to support better decision-making and amplifying the positive impacts on the business.
If you want to know how this can be implemented in the specific context of your company, get in touch with Engeman® and talk to those who understand the subject best!
