Root Cause Analysis Theories

Root Cause Analysis
Proper root cause analysis identifies the basic source or origin of your problem. Root cause analysis is a step by step approach that leads to the identification of a fault's first or root cause. Every system, equipment, or component failure happens for a reason. There are specific successions of events that lead to a failure. A root cause analysis investigation follows the cause and effect path from the final failure back to the root cause.

Root Cause Analysis Procedure
The procedure investigates the failure using facts left behind from the initial flaw. By evaluating the remaining evidence after the fault and information from people associated with the incident, the analyst can identify both the contributing and non-contributing causes that caused the event.

Root cause analysis provides a methodology for investigating, categorizing, and eliminating, root causes of incidents with safety, quality, reliability, and manufacturing process consequences.

AMC collects the data, analyses the data, develops appropriate corrective action, presents the data clearly and generates practical recommendations. Root cause analysis is a tool to better explain what happened, to determine how it happened, and to understand why it happened.

The root cause analysis methodology provides clients specific, concrete recommendations for preventing incident recurrences. AMC identifies the processes and procedures that need changing to improve clients businesses.

Understanding the existing data of the incident, the root cause analysis method allows safety, quality, and risk and reliability managers an opportunity to implement more reliable and more cost effective policies that result in significant, enduring opportunities for improvement. These procedural improvements increase a business' capability to recover from and prevent disasters with both financial and safety consequences.

Root Cause Failure Analysis

Failure of a component indicates it has become completely or partially unusable or has deteriorated to the point that it is undependable or unsafe for normal sustained service.

Failure Analysis is an engineering approach to determining how and why equipment or a component has failed. Some general causes for failure are structural loading, wear, corrosion, and latent defects. The goal of a failure analysis is to understand the root cause of the failure so as to prevent similar failures in the future.

In addition to verifying the failure mode it is important to determine the factors that explain the how and why of the failure event. Identifying the root cause of the failure event allows us to explain the how and why of failure.

Preventing Reoccurrence of the Failure

It is not always necessary to prevent the first, or root cause, from happening. It is merely necessary to break the chain of events at any point and the final failure will not occur. Frequently the root cause analysis identifies an initial design problem. Then a redesign is commonly enacted. Where the root cause analysis leads back to a failure of procedures it is necessary to either address the procedural weakness or to develop an approach to prevent the damage caused by the procedural failure.

Clients understand why root causes are important, have identified and defined inherent problems, and enacted practical recommendations. AMC has extensive engineering and quality assurance experience to provide clients with proven successful techniques to identify the root cause of their problems and appropriate solutions to these problems