Root Cause Failure Analysis and Troubleshooting, Reactive or Proactive?

My friend, Alaa Omar, posted a question about Root Cause Failure Analysis and Troubleshooting are they the same or synonymous?

https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/alaa-omar-5676b637_rca-rootcause-rootcauseanalysis-activity-6655139585351397376-CQrQ

Actually, Troubleshooting is part of Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA). At troubleshooting, we analyze events and situations to reach failure causes at the component level, which we may call “physical Cause”. But going further by deeper analysis (with any specific RCFA methodology) can lead to reaching deeper levels of roots for the problem, i.e. Human roots and Latent (Organizational) roots. That is what we can call RCFA.

The below drawing (which is taken from one slides at my RCFA course) illustrates an example of this meaning. (only one line illustrative for definitions)

To reach the root cause, we need to go through troubleshooting to identify physical roots or maybe causal factors.

The above discussion led to another question: Is Root Cause Failure Analysis reactive or proactive?

Traditionally, when our machines fail or when problems happen, we need to know why they happened. So we conduct RCFA to reach failure causes at their roots. 

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Proactive is "Acting in anticipation of future problems, needs, or changes". In other words, "To act BEFORE a situation becomes a source of confrontation or crisis".

Referring to this definition, Root Cause Failure Analysis, which is traditionally conducted after failures, seems to be, conceptually, a reactive process (as it is triggered after failures and problems happen).

Nevertheless, RCFA has a significant return on investment and profits represented by preventing the reoccurrence, this is the proactive part of this important process.

In this process, the traditional (reactive) RCFA, triggering events cause some losses which could be related to either safety, production outages and/or repair cost. This cycle can be shown in the illustrated below figure.

Alternatively, Root Cause Failure Analysis, can be also done in a proactive way to be purely proactive one. This can be done after gaining some expertise in RCFA, investing a slightly more and with integrating with some other proactive methodologies and techniques. This means that RCA can be able to forecast and reduce the probability of an event even before it could occur.

The below figure illustrates both types:

Having such proactive RCFA will lead to preventing or reducing the occurrence of failures with greater returns and savings of HSE Production availability and reduced repair cost.

Some examples of triggers or initiators of Proactive RCFA are:

-         Analyzing Near-misses or Close calls:

Near-misses are often less apparent than accidents and are defined as having a little impact (if any). Despite their limited impact, near-misses provide insight into potential failures that could happen. Near-misses related to significant processes should be considered as they have already happened and should be analyzed using a disciplined technique for root cause failure analysis.

-         Analyzing Audits and Assessments Findings:

Audit/Assessment process is considered as a mechanism to monitor the system as a whole and make sure it is working properly. The purpose of an Audit or Assessment is to detect the defects and degradations at management or organizational systems as well as assets reliability to identify problem areas needs to be analyzed for root causes. Also, it can directly discover existing real problems or potential problems.

Audit findings should be taken and treated as causal factors need to be analyzed through a

disciplined failure analysis system like RCA or any other methodology according its feasibility.

-         Analyzing Trends:

Trends and using statistics are major sources of information. They alert us to generic issues. Trends showing significant changes are not random and therefore they must be caused by something. By proper use of mathematical tools, we can detect significant trends and, because they have a cause, we can analyze the process proactively for the root causes using RCFA.

All the above examples can be considered as triggers and initiators for Proactive Root Cause Failure Analysis.

As a conclusion,

Fighting failures and preventing performance degradation is the challenge to improve performance and to do so have two choices:

-         To fight and improve reactively,

This means to respond to failures and accommodate their consequences then analyze and investigate for their causes then correct them at the root cause level to prevent reoccurrence. i.e., Traditional “reactive” root cause analysis.

-         To fight and improve proactively,

This means to anticipate future problems before they became a confrontation. To invest at searching for the root causes and eliminate them before they cause a failure.

To forecast for the way your progress is heading to and take actions to stop any foreseen degradation. And on the other hand, search for real effective opportunities to increase performance

level at the critical processes after identification of them. Following this concept, performance significantly will be improved with quick results and losses can be avoided or reduced to its minimum.

The application of proactive root cause failure analysis and performance improvement integrates with many techniques. Most of these techniques play a role in Proactive Failure Analysis initiation or identification.

Organizations pay some investments to apply both reactive root cause analysis and the proactive root cause analysis. It's obvious that the investment cost at proactive RCA is slightly higher than at reactive RCA as it applies to general and hidden root causes instead of searching for specific root causes at the actual identified incidents.

Reactive RCA has its significant return on investment and profits represented by preventing the reoccurrence of the failure but also it is accompanied by the losses resulted from the failure. It is a reactive triggered process with proactive heart which is preventing reoccurrence.

On the other hand, Proactive RCA has a significant return on investments and profits without the previously mentioned losses. More and above, removing the generic root cause affects many similar assets and cases not only the failed case.

What do you think about these ideas? Your comments and discussions are appreciated.