How to Learn from Failures with Fred Schenkelberg
No matter how good you are at your job, there are always failures in the systems because of some reason. You can’t stop all of them but you can learn from them. There is always something to learn when a failure occurs. Whether it is finding the root cause or devising a solution to prevent it in the future. What happens in the industry that we forget what failures occurred in the last few years?—over the time. This is something that is alarming. It is your job to remember or communicate with those who might. That is how you can better assess the nature and root cause of the failure.
Whenever a failure occurs, there is a window of opportunity. The opportunity to learn from it, gain experience, and take measures to prevent it. You just need to accept it. How did this happen? What is that we are doing differently now? These are the questions that everyone should be able to answer on your team. You need to sit down with the decision makers and let them know what is going on. Then figure out with them what you can do to prevent it? This should be done generically and with the help of every recorded data you have.
You can document it and share it with the members of the reliability program. You need to discuss it more often to avoid repeating the same mistakes again. All you need to do is create awareness. When people are aware of the problem, they tend to be more committed towards the solution. There are standards for different processes. There are guidelines for everything that you do. But at the end of the day, your organization needs to modify them according to the processes and techniques they have in place.
This is something that should be taken into account in the designing phase. You can create internal standards as well. You can create simple checklists and make them part of the design reviews as well. This gives you valuable insight into the possible solutions. It also helps you to keep track of the allocation of resources. Whenever a new piece of equipment is brought in, you can sit in a room with all your team members. They will give their inputs about what is that they are doing with it today? And how are they supposed to use in the future?
You can do FMEA or other analysis to better know the problem. But along with other things, you need to get them in a break room and talk about what they have to offer. This is the way to reach the best decisions. You need to design your databases categorically based on specific areas. This not only saved time, it provides you historical information about repetitive failures. Even if you don’t have that necessary data, you need to gather all the stories that senior employees have to tell. Get them together with the other members and then take it from there.
Eruditio Links:
- Eruditio
- HP Reliability
- A Smarter Way of Preventative Maintenance Free eBook
- inspired Blended Learning (iBL®)
- James Kovacevic’s LinkedIn
Fred Schenkelberg Links:
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