You made it! You’re a FRACAS pro now!
Well, you’ve made it! It’s Halloween and you’ve reached the end of my FRACAS series, and I’m sure some of you are getting a little misty eyed! Not to worry, sometime in the not-to-distant future, I’ll be back sharing my rantings, ravings and general musings on another topic.
A brief recap. FRACAS stands for Failure Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action System. Which means you start by ensuring failure incidents are reported. Then you do some type of analysis to ensure you’ve identified the root cause(s) of the failure. Finally, you put a corrective action in place to ensure the same type of failure incident doesn’t happen again. Sounds pretty simple, right? Truth is, it can be simple or complex.
Personally, I like things simple. And the key to keeping it simple is to remember that your system doesn’t have to be perfect at the beginning. Just as with any other business process or system, look to continually improve. Start with just Failure Reporting. You first need to see where your process or equipment failures are occurring. And you need to do this by relying on empirical data rather than anecdotal information. Just collecting failure-related data will enlighten you. It can tell you where the problems are, and in turn will allow you to prioritize where you focus your resources to fix them.
FRACAS won’t be terrifying … if you keep it simple!
From an Analysis standpoint, remember: not every failure incident warrants a Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA). Make sure you have triggers for the RCFA process. These triggers should be connected to the big three: Customer, Cost or Revenue. And when you do decide to do an RCFA, make sure you look for the Root Cause(s) and don’t just stop at putting containment in place and/or treating the symptoms, otherwise you risk the failure recurring.
For Corrective Actions, the key is to identify those few critical corrective actions that are: practical, feasible and cost effective.
Finally, you’ll need to have a way of managing your FRACAS process. There are a handful of very good FRACAS software solutions that are commercially available. I’m currently helping a client implement one. Although cost is a relative thing, these solutions (in my opinion) are relatively inexpensive in the grand scheme of things. Since I’m uh … seasoned, I can remember the days of doing things manually, then creating a system in dBase III for FRACAS … Goodness!! No need to do it that way these days, and once again, in my opinion, it really doesn’t make sense to create a ‘home grown’ FRACAS software solution. The software solutions available today are powerful tools that are relatively easy to configure to fit your particular FRACAS needs. These solutions typically can be on premise, Software as a Service (SaaS – cloud based) or you can host it in your own private cloud, depending on the solution provider.
Hopefully this series of tips on FRACAS have been or will be useful to you. It certainly has been my pleasure to share them with you!
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