By Jim Fitch
Machinery Lubrication Magazine
Knowing when a piece of equipment is going to fail (predictive maintenance) is much more difficult than making it last long (proactive maintenance). Even more complex is root cause analysis (RCA) which is performed postmortem, like an autopsy.
Still, reliability professionals are increasingly stressing the importance of performing RCAs following all failures of critical machinery. As odd as it sounds, it is more productive to study failures than successes.
After all, an apparent success may actually be a failure in disguise; more like a problem waiting to happen. Studying failures teaches us insightful lessons in developing predictive and proactive maintenance strategy.
Root cause failure analysis is a process of working backward through a sequence of events or steps that led to functional failure of the machine.