In the past we have used various root cause methods, but only on high cost/production impact type of failures. For the general low to medium cost failures, no formal process was in place. We are adopting the 5 why method, starting with all pump failures, to get a better handle on our reliability. The 5 why's is a simple process, initiated by operations and continuing on to maintenance or reliability if required to reach cause. Any comments or history?

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Originally posted by Rick G:
In the past we have used various root cause methods, but only on high cost/production impact type of failures. For the general low to medium cost failures, no formal process was in place. We are adopting the 5 why method, starting with all pump failures, to get a better handle on our reliability. The 5 why's is a simple process, initiated by operations and continuing on to maintenance or reliability if required to reach cause. Any comments or history?

Rick , our experience has been that 5 Why's is useful where there is a single physical cause that is reasonably obvious however in most cases even with low to medium cost failures we have found that there are multiple causes ( acts & conditions) that contribute to a equipment failure , so you need to ensure that when using 5 why's you develop multiple root causes , also it is important to also identify the underlying management system failure that contributed to the physical failure if you want to develop actions that will prevent the failure or similar types of failures from happening in the future
Over time you should find that the underlying root causes of the medium to low cost failures are the same as for the high cost production impact failures , so it makes sense to learn and improve your maintenance systems as much as possible by investigating your low cost failures , rather than only learning from your high cost failures