When it comes to looking for failures during a Reliability Study or for causes during a Root Cause Analysis investigation, ‘Listen to your operators’.
They are the eyes and ears of your production facility. It doesn’t matter if you are running a chocolate factory, bottling beer, or drilling for oil, they all have one thing in common - operators on the front line.
These valuable members of your team are often the first to notice problems occurring; these problems may only stop the machine once a shift for a few minutes while they go and hit the reset button. These ‘high frequency short duration’ issues often get reported but are not seen or considered as critical because we have not yet witnessed a major stoppage. After all, we hit the reset button and the machine starts again.
A few things start to naturally happen at this stage.
• Operators stop reporting faults because nobody does anything about them
• Operators start to change the operating practice of the machine to allow for these issues during their shift. This then becomes normal operating practice, without any form of risk assessment having been performed. These changes are usually only identified following a major incident investigation. When it is often too late.
Reliability is like Safety - Ignore the little things and before log it could be something major.
Typical comments used by operators during Reliability Studies and RCA investigations are:
• ‘We’ve been doing it that way for years’
• ‘We kept reporting it to management’
• ‘I used to do that task but we removed it from our check list because we never found anything’
Great examples exist like the operator who used to carry out torque checks on a rotating piece of equipment at the end of shift, only to be told it was no longer required. Two years later the Reliability investigation into downtime on the machine revealed ‘sheared bolts’ as the number one failure mode on the machine. We re-introduce the torque checks and the problem disappears.
Or the Root Cause Analysis performed on a ‘light curtain trip’ that stopped the machine once a shift for five minutes. The downtime lost on this ‘insignificant’ problem was quantified to be worth over $1million in losses to the business. The solution identified during the Root Cause Analysis equalled $34,000! The problem solved.
So during Reliability Studies and Root Cause Analysis, listen to your plant engineers, equipment specialists and OEMs, but, whatever you do, don’t forget to ‘Listen to your operators’
They are the eyes and ears of your production facility. It doesn’t matter if you are running a chocolate factory, bottling beer, or drilling for oil, they all have one thing in common - operators on the front line.
These valuable members of your team are often the first to notice problems occurring; these problems may only stop the machine once a shift for a few minutes while they go and hit the reset button. These ‘high frequency short duration’ issues often get reported but are not seen or considered as critical because we have not yet witnessed a major stoppage. After all, we hit the reset button and the machine starts again.
A few things start to naturally happen at this stage.
• Operators stop reporting faults because nobody does anything about them
• Operators start to change the operating practice of the machine to allow for these issues during their shift. This then becomes normal operating practice, without any form of risk assessment having been performed. These changes are usually only identified following a major incident investigation. When it is often too late.
Reliability is like Safety - Ignore the little things and before log it could be something major.
Typical comments used by operators during Reliability Studies and RCA investigations are:
• ‘We’ve been doing it that way for years’
• ‘We kept reporting it to management’
• ‘I used to do that task but we removed it from our check list because we never found anything’
Great examples exist like the operator who used to carry out torque checks on a rotating piece of equipment at the end of shift, only to be told it was no longer required. Two years later the Reliability investigation into downtime on the machine revealed ‘sheared bolts’ as the number one failure mode on the machine. We re-introduce the torque checks and the problem disappears.
Or the Root Cause Analysis performed on a ‘light curtain trip’ that stopped the machine once a shift for five minutes. The downtime lost on this ‘insignificant’ problem was quantified to be worth over $1million in losses to the business. The solution identified during the Root Cause Analysis equalled $34,000! The problem solved.
So during Reliability Studies and Root Cause Analysis, listen to your plant engineers, equipment specialists and OEMs, but, whatever you do, don’t forget to ‘Listen to your operators’
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