Equipment or component failure can have significant costs for your business including reputation, revenue, production, maintenance down-time, environmental, and safety. It is often necessary to conduct a failure analysis when failures occur. A failure analysis is an investigation to determine what caused a component to fail. The aim of these investigations is to take corrective actions to help prevent the same type of failure from re-occurring.

Reasons to Perform a Failure Analysis

It is valuable to understand why a component failed. Was there was a design flaw that prevented it from performing its intended function? Perhaps it had a manufacturing or material defect. Or, perhaps the product was used outside its design criteria, or exceeded its useful life and wore out. The following outline the most common reasons to perform a failure analysis.

1. Understand the root cause of a failure. Understanding the root cause is often the fundamental part of the failure analysis process. This involves data collection to ascertain whether failure occurred due to manufacturing or material defect or misuse. Note, Root Cause Analysis can also be used to identify what led to something going right so it can be duplicated in the future.
2. Take corrective action. Corrective actions can be taken to prevent recurrence of the problem once the cause of failure has been determined. This may include a redesign of the product or a review of the parameters that the product is being used in.
3. Improve future products. Improve manufacturing processes and product designs with an understanding of the failure mode. This can prevent the problem from happening again, prevent costly legal action or replacements, and protect a company’s reputation, the environment, and personnel safety.
4. Prevent financial losses from failed components. Failure can be costly, whether due to expensive outages, a stopping of production, or even legal action as a result. Undertaking failure analysis can prevent these problems from growing or potential failures from happening in the future. 
5. Ensure components meet standards that they are designed to. Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) can help to meet standards for manufacturing processes, failed components, products, or assets going forward.
6. Aid in the determination of accountability for failure. A failure analysis can determine the cause of the failure and may also aid in assigning responsibility for the failure. This can be used in legal proceedings to apportion blame and protect yourself from litigation.

Summary

Equipment failures are unfortunate, but they can teach valuable lessons going forward. The failure analysis process provides several benefits including financial, legal and safety related outcomes.

Interested in learning more about the failure analysis and other reliability services we provide? Please contact us and we will have one our experts reach out!