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Even when you set out to improve the reliability of your plant you’ll continue to experience failures in your plant. We know from experience that some 80% of failures that occur in a plant have occurred before. That’s where defect elimination comes in.
What happens in most organisations that deal with repeat failures? We plan for these failures. We write job plans. We hold extra spares. And when then failure happens we can fix it fast. We get better and better at fixing failures.
That’s great, right?
Maybe. Chances are that you could be a lot greater if instead of fixing that failure over and over again you actually fixed the source of the failure. If you fixed the defect that is causing that failure.
You will get nowhere on the Road to Reliability™
Without Defect Elimination
Research done by Winston Ledet whilst working for Dupont in the 1990’s has shown that when you implement Planning & Scheduling, Preventive Maintenance and Defect Elimination you can reduce your downtime by 90%. 1
About 30% of that reduction in downtime is because of Planning & Scheduling and Preventive Maintenance.
And about 60% is the result of Defect Elimination.
Simply put, you’ll never become a Reliable Plant if you don’t get rid of those defects that keep generating failures.
You will always be fighting fires and working in a reactive environment unless you get rid of those defects.
Implementing Planning & Scheduling on its own is not enough. Implementing Preventive Maintenance on its own is not enough. Even implementing both is not enough.
You need to start applying Root Cause Analysis and establish a Defect Elimination culture to make big strides in improving your reliability.
defect elimination improves
plant reliability more than anything else
With the Road to Reliability™ Framework you can reduce your downtime by 90%. And although you need all 4 Essential Elements to succeed the majority of your downtime reduction will come through Defect Elimination. In this article, I will explain in detail why you need to apply Root Cause Analysis and establish a Defect Elimination culture to succeed in your journey to a Reliable Plant.
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and Defect Elimination are similar, but not the same. Root Cause Analysis focusses on getting rid of the 20% of issues that cause 80% of your breakdowns, downtime and costs. Defect Elimination is all about removing the many small, niggly little issues in your plant. And it’s very much a culture change. In this article, I explain how Root Cause Analysis and Defect Elimination work together and what it looks like in a Reliable Plant.
Knowing that Root Cause Analysis and Defect Elimination are critical to your reliability success is one thing. Implementing them successfully and sustaining the change in the long run is a very different story. In this article, I will give you a detailed step-by-step implementation guide that addresses both RCA techniques as well as building a Defect Elimination Culture.
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