For FRACAS to be effective, all parts of the system have to be effective. The system will eventually fail even you’re only doing an excellent job at Failure Reporting and Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA). And it will fail badly, particularly if you end up with a wish list of corrective actions that are poorly organized and attempt to address every issue. Your goal is to find the best alternatives that resolves the problem and prevents recurrence.
The key is to identify those few critical corrective actions that are practical, feasible and cost effective. Those issues that the organization has little to no control or influence over are a waste of time to include on your list, so don’t try to be a martyr! Remember what happens to martyrs, they usually end up dead!
Getting to the cause(s) of a problem can be fairly easy at times. But getting something done about it is a whole different story. Once you’ve identified the corrective action(s) to implement, then you’ll need to develop an implementation plan. The plan is fairly simple: what the action is, who’s responsible, and when is it supposed to be done.
Once corrective actions have been identified, they should be implemented as quickly as possible within the boundary of practical, feasible, cost effective. Many organizations will perform an exhaustive RCFA, develop appropriate corrective actions to implement, but simply never get around to implementing them. You may think this doesn’t happen; however, I’ve seen it on more than one occasion. What typically happens is a failure occurs, then months later the same failure occurs, and people find out that the corrective actions originally identified during the RCFA of the failure were never implemented. So just think: you spend all that time to have failures reported, perform RCFAs (as deemed appropriate), develop corrective actions, but then never implement them!
There are a variety of reasons why this happens, such as higher priorities, too many RCFAs, too many corrective action recommendations, not enough resources, lack of effective processes, and so on. Once again, for FRACAS to be effective, all parts of the system have to be effective. It requires organization, focus and commitment to ensure the loop is closed–something which is often easier said than done.
Now that you’ve implemented the corrective action(s), you’re still not done. What? Why? The last part is verifying/validating that the corrective action(s) are effective. The team may have done a great job at identifying the corrective actions, the implementation plan may have been meticulous, nevertheless, “shit happens!” The corrective action plan must contain steps to verify/validate its effectiveness. You need to ensure there are no unwanted or unforeseen side effects of the actions that were taken. Remember Newton’s Third Law: for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. The last thing you need or want is a bigger problem than what you started with.
The methods for verifying/validating will differ depending on the failure, or if the failure is equipment-related or process-related. For equipment-related failures, verification/validation can oftentimes be done through testing. For process-related failures, it’s best done through monitoring and follow-up.
One final note on corrective action implementation: make sure you update everything related to the problem in order to prevent its recurrence! This includes things such as drawings, specifications, maintenance procedures, manuals, training materials, work instructions, process flow charts, etc. One of the biggest failures I’ve seen that’s common in our industry is the red-lined drawing that never gets updated.
In next week’s tip, I’ll wrap up my discussion on FRACAS.
© 2017 by LinRich Solutions, LLC. All rights reserved
