How Good Storytelling Contributes to our Equipment’s Reliability…

(Video Transcript)

Hi everyone. I’m in Melbourne, Australia and I’m out for a walk because I’ve never been here, and I’m exploring and want to get to know more about the city. And, it reminds me about Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM).

There’s a step in RCM where we write Failure Effects. We write a Failure Effect for each Failure Mode (aka Failure Cause) that we identify in the analysis. A Failure Effect is a story of what would happen if nothing were done to predict, prevent, or manage the Failure Mode.

So, the reason why it reminds me about exploring in Melbourne, is because writing Failure Effects can be an exploration of your equipment. And, Failure Effects can do three very important things for your organization.

#1: It can help you to learn more about your equipment. Because when you write a Failure Effect, you have to write all the details from the occurrence of the Failure Mode to Functional Failure.

So, for example, you have to include what evidence might be occurring that the Failure Mode is in the process of occurring. For example, vibration, heat, and other indicators. And, what warning lights or what alarms might go off. You have to figure out if there could be any Safety Consequences or Environmental or Operational Consequences and what those would be. So, it’s a lot of information that you have to identify, and you can learn a lot about your equipment that way.

Now the other thing is, oftentimes when Failure Effects are written, sometimes a Working Group doesn’t exactly know all of the details. So another thing that writing Failure Effects does, is it helps you to identify what you don’t know. And that is a very big strength.

The last thing I want to talk about is that, you know, oftentimes we have people working in our organizations who have been there for 20, 30, 40 years. And maybe they’re leaving for a particular reason or they’re retiring. And what happens is, they leave with all of that knowledge and experience that they have – that leaves with them when they go. Well, when you write Failure Effects for all of the Failure Modes that you identified, it’s like memorializing your equipment experts’ knowledge and experience.

So, there you have it. Writing Failure Effects can be a really fruitful experience for your organization. Just like exploring a new city, writing Failure Effects can be like exploring your own equipment. And, you can learn a lot from it. I’m Nancy Regan. Thank you for watching.