Understanding your equipment failure

Hello. I'm Jeff Shiver, Managing Principal of People and Processes. I'd like to share some thoughts with you regarding your equipment failures and how you actually understand how the items failed.

At many companies I go to, when they have a failure of any significance they don't actually pull the equipment out and take it apart and understand why it failed and that's incredibly important to do. To do that, what we want to do is almost like the crime scene investigation things that you see on TV. You can't necessarily rope the area off but we can definitely take the piece of equipment out and we can cut it apart or we can open it up or whatever the case may be and understand how it failed and to help you do that there's some tools.

For example, you can go out on the web and Google images for "brinelling" or "over loading the bearings" or things like that. Same thing with gear teeth and stuff. For example, we talked about bearings. If you don't restore the bearing as part taking it out, demounting it and disassembling it, what you can do is send that bearing off to SKF and they'll actually analyze it and help you understand why it failed and give that information at no charge.

The goal is how do you make it better? How do you learn from your failures so they don't need to recur? I hope you enjoy the tip. I'm Jeff Shiver, managing principal of People and Processes. Have a great day.