Forensics in the Field

One of the “best practices” touted by some experts is to determine the failure cause during a repair. Often, this is reasonable and achievable. In many cases, however, it’s not. And even when it is, field techs might not have the time, expertise, or equipment to accurately determine the failure cause.

In one plant, repair techs rushed from one downtime incident to another, but had to check a box on a list of failure causes. This information was put into a spreadshe