Maintenance professionals probably spend a lot of time putting out fires: administering quick fixes to small, nuisance-type problems. All too often these problems are “solved” to “get back on stream” and the problems keep on recurring. These chronic failures can eat up to 80% of the maintenance budget. We must, therefore, move from being “maintenance repairman” to “problem analyst”. We need to identify the causes underlying the problems and do something to prevent the problems from ever happening again.

Many maintenance professionals, maintenance managers, and equipment reliability engineers do not use a systematic approach to troubleshooting and root cause analysis.

Whether you’re looking to enhance your maintenance strategies, optimize your manufacturing processes, or improve your quality management system, understanding and applying RCFA principles can be a game-changer for your organization.

RCFA has a connotation of a failure analysis on mechanical / electrical components , functional loss of components /equipment / process or function reduction of equipment/ process. Using a a structured, data-driven process RCFA helps to identify the underlying causes of problems or failures.

The goal of RCFA is to determine the root cause of an issue, rather than just addressing the immediate or obvious symptoms. RCFA is primary used to address chronic problems in industry.

RCFA utilizes various analytical techniques such as fault tree analysis, Ishikawa diagrams, Ladder Diagram, P-M Analysis and the 5 Whys method, just to mention a few, to systematically uncover the underlying reasons for the failure. It then incorporate a full blown Root Cause Analysis to identify the human and latent roots, By addressing the root cause, organizations can then implement corrective actions that prevent the problem from recurring.

It is simply impossible to deal with every conceivable type of failure. This course is structured to teach failure identification and analysis methods that can be applied to virtually all problem situations that might arise. A uniform methodology of failure analysis and root cause analysis is needed to analyze a situation thoroughly to find its underlying cause.