Things to Think About and Do in 2012: Standards

Below is an excerpt from ReliabilityWeb.com's E-Book: Things to Think About and Do in 2012.

Standards

When faced with problems, we often go into root cause analysis (RCA) mode trying to find the single cause of the problem. However, problems are often the result of multiple causes. In total productive maintenance (TPM), we identify chronic deterioration that eventually combines to cause sporadic failures.

A different approach is to ask a simple question: Do we have a standard If we don’t have a standard, the appropriate response is to create one. Let’s define a standard as a reliable method that produces the required output from given inputs.

I have been working recently with a beverage can profucer with high speed automated production lines but very variable levels of defects. The RCA approach was not generating sustainable improvements because no on knew why defects were high in one batch and low in another, with multiple causal factors. Our approach, therefore, was to identify the key process parameters and record them for a “good” batch, and when defects arose, return the process to the standard parameters of the good batch. After we identified which parameters had slipped, we can then use reliability engineering ot TPM approaches to prevent them from deteriorating in the future.

Even if we have a standard, there are more questions to be answered:

• Have we communicated the standard effectively?
• Have we trained people in the standard adequately?
• Are people using the standard consistently?

Only if we can answer all these questions positively should we then ask:

• Is the standard a reliable method?
• In other words, is the process capable?

So my thing to think about and do in 2012 is: When faced with a problem, ask yourself, “Do we have a standard?” The answer may surprise you.

-Malcom Jones