Abstract
Industries strive hard to run their assets effectively and accurately, whilst also protecting the wellbeing of all personnel and equipment with which it interacts – as well as the measures in place to assure the asset’s life cycle. Failure analysis, an important action item of strategy of asset integrity management, is applied in a reactive fashion. The process of failure analysis is easy to understand intuitively, however, underneath that intuitive understanding are important conceptual principles, which are commonly either misunderstood or not considered at all. As a result, failure of assets in industries are still a challenge to asset integrity management system. The purpose of this paper is entirely positive, to understand complexity of the failure analysis process and present the concept of Total Failure Management (TFM). TFM is the process of understanding the contributing causes, root cause(s), underlying causal-effect dilemma and applying this knowledge proactively to manage harm from future failure threats. When leveraged through the framework of a failure management system, failure analysis improves the ability of investigators to identify the root cause correctly and determine effective remedial measures. Thus, a TFM process may contribute directly and effectively to improve reliability and integrity of the assets.
