Proactive Equifactor
Most TapRooT® equipment reliability professionals are using Equifactor® to help troubleshoot their equipment failures, but how can you use Equifactor® as a proactive tool? Here are some great ideas.
When a new piece of equipment arrives, how should it be installed? Use the Equifactor® troubleshooting tables to discover the common failure modes of your new gear. You may remember that baseplate design (materials, resonant frequency rejection, etc) should be considered when mounting that new pump.
The best time to decide on PdM requirements is prior to installation. Getting the vibration monitoring transducers and temperature detectors wired in is much more difficult once the machine is installed. Use Equifactor® to see what can fail, and then decide on how you will monitor for these types of failures. Get your PdM requirements figured out early.
Once it’s installed, it is important to operate it correctly. While the vendor manual may discuss start-up and shutdown procedures, it may not consider your unique operating environment or specific uses. Will your machine have a duty-cycle drastically different from the original design? Is the environment extremely dusty? Equifactor® will remind you to look at these factors.
What logs should you maintain? How often should you take these logs? Look at common failure modes to help verify you are monitoring the right parameters.
Vendor manuals give good guidelines concerning preventive maintenance periodicities, but you may also want to use RCM methods to streamline these requirements. Equifactor® can help here, too, making sure the maintenance requirements will cover all probable failure modes.
For already-installed equipment, use Equifactor® to conduct an audit of your gear (possibly in conjunction with an RCM determination or an FMEA). This may open up ideas you hadn’t previously thought about.
Be creative in your use of Equifactor®. It is an excellent tool when performing a root cause analysis of equipment failures, but you don’t have to wait until it breaks to fix it!
