Efficient Plant May 2021 - 20

Answers to questions
facing today's reliability
& maintenance
professionals

department | on the floor

Failure Q
Codes Key A
To Problem
Elimination

How important are failure
codes?

Dr. Klaus M. Blache
Univ. of Tennessee Reliability
and Maintainability Center
(RMC)

20

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EP2105onthefloor.indd 20

A better way to ask the question
is, " What are failure codes doing
for you? " The response would explain
their current importance, but possibly
not everything they should be doing
for you. A failure code is basically
an alphanumeric grouping that, in
a concise way, depicts why the asset
failed. Codes include such things as
air leaks, calibration issues, operator
error, insufficient lubrication, over
lubrication, misalignment, overheating, machine controls, contamination,
defective part, and abuse/vandalism.
Exact format varies based on your
industry, maintenance system, and
internal processes.
How many failure codes you use (how
specific you get) depends on your plantfloor culture and overall maturity of
current maintenance practices. If you
adequately tie the codes to work orders,
you can track repeat failures to trigger
root-cause analysis. Are your failure
codes:
	 available to all and understandable
	 trended on a Pareto chart
	 put on a matrix of severity and frequency of occurrence to prioritize efforts
	 specific enough to enable problem
solving, but easy to use
	 tied to such items as individual assets,
components, and causes
	 supported with enough description/
clarity to enable continuous improvement
	 generic or categorized such as maintenance-tasking insufficient (resulting in
issues such as not enough or too much

lubrication or improper installation),
asset problem (pump, bearing, and
motor), calibration, or human errors
	 built with a parent-child hierarchy so
you can view issues, causes, and fixes
	 used as input for your root-cause
analysis process, FMEAs, TPM (looking
at six big losses with continuous improvement teams)?
My studies show that, regardless of
the computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), an average
of less than 30% of the full capability of
the CMMS is applied. What I typically
hear is that it's probably not more than
20%. Your failure-code strategy needs to
be well thought out and implemented to
align with your level of maintenance and
reliability maturity. This should be done
as a team effort with all of the groups
(maintenance, engineering/reliability,
operations, finance, technicians, and
operators) to assure proper input and
buy in. Just like putting together your
workflow/management process before
selecting your CMMS, the appropriate
failure codes should be set up before full
CMMS implementation.
I see numbers between 20 and 40
failure codes in many companies. Most
computer systems allow you to set up
failure codes to a naming convention. Be
consistent. If tied to assets, you will total
more codes as you get more equipment
specific. Keep it simple and effective.
More codes are fine if it works in your
culture and gets accurate input.
The International Organization for
Standardization (ISO), Geneva, Switzerland, (iso.org), has some documents that
can help. One example is ISO 14224 (First

MAY 2021

4/26/21 9:29 AM
http://www.iso.org http://www.EFFICIENTPLANTMAG.COM
Efficient Plant May 2021

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