Heinz Bloch – Who Is He & How Is He Related to Equifactor® Equipment Troubleshooting?
Heinz Bloch – Who is he?
Heinz Bloch is a well-known equipment reliability expert with vast experience. He has written over 760 books and technical publications. He is a contributing equipment reliability author on the staff of Hydrocarbon Processing magazine. Heinz has a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and was one of the inaugural inductees in the Newark College of Engineering Hall of Fame.
Heinz started his post-graduate career at Johnson & Johnson (where he received 14 patents for equipment from countries around the world) but was soon recruited away by Exxon. At Exxon he worked on equipment reliability improvement efforts around the world, gaining extensive experience that became the basis for his writing and consulting after he retired from Exxon.
When Heinz retired from Exxon in 1986, he started his new career as a consulting equipment reliability engineer and lecturer (which he continues to this day).
Heinz Bloch and Equifactor® Equipment Troubleshooting
In 1997, Mark Paradies, one of the co-developers of the TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis System, was looking for help improving equipment failure root cause analysis. He had found that many companies had trouble finding the root causes of equipment failures because they didn’t perform effective equipment troubleshooting before starting their root cause analysis. He met Heinz at a professional conference and, after much work, their discussion led to the Equifactor® Equipment Troubleshooting Tables.
The tables were a result of Heinz’s extensive troubleshooting experience. The tables provided a systematic, consistent way to understand how equipment failed. The information gained using the tables provided the basic information needed to understand the root causes of the equipment failures. The information gained during the troubleshooting often guided reliability experts to find human performance reasons for equipment failures.
The Equifactor® Troubleshooting Tables were integrated into the TapRooT® Software and a new course was developed:
Equifactor Equipment Troubleshooting and TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis
This new course and software helped people who were not equipment reliability experts (operators, mechanics, maintenance supervisors, and safety professionals) learn to troubleshoot equipment failures and use the information gained to find the root causes of incidents that they were investigating.
Also, people who are equipment reliability experts often find that the Equifactor® Equipment Troubleshooting Tables help them assure themselves that they didn’t miss anything in their troubleshooting efforts.
Heinz has continued his involvement since those initial days when he took time from his busy schedule to teach some of the initial courses (back in the late 1990s). Over the last 20+ years, Heinz has spoken many times about improving equipment reliability at our Global TapRooT® Summit – both as a Keynote Speaker and as a presenter in our Best Practice Breakout Sessions.
Learn More: Register for an Equifactor® Course
Would you like to learn best practices for troubleshooting equipment failures and finding their root causes? Would you like to learn how you can use the Equifactor® Troubleshooting Tables to proactively improve your equipment reliability? Then you should attend one of our public Equifactor Equipment Troubleshooting and TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis Courses.
Want more details about Equifactor® Troubleshooting? See THIS LINK.
Here is the course outline:
Equifactor® Course Outline
DAY ONE
- Introductions
- Understanding What Happened – SnapCharT® Basics
- SnapCharT® Exercise
- Collecting Information
- Failure Modes and Failure Agents
- Equifactor® Troubleshooting Tables
- Human Errors
- Process Troubleshooting
- Example: Troubleshooting a Seawater Pump
DAY TWO
- TapRooT®/Equifactor® Software Introduction
- Identifying Causal Factors
- Introduction to the Root Cause Tree®
- Exercise: Walking Through the Root Cause Tree®
- Exercise: Teams Find Root Causes Using the Root Cause Tree®
- Change Analysis
- Change Analysis Exercise
- Final Exercise: Solving a Major Equipment Issue
The course materials include the book, Using Equifactor® Troubleshooting Tools and TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis to Improve Equipment Reliability, a TapRooT® Root Cause Tree®, the Root Cause Tree® Dictionary, and the Corrective Action Helper® Guide, a $129 value. The book includes a complete set of Heinz Bloch’s troubleshooting tables.
Upon completion of the course, attendees will receive a certificate of completion and a 90-day subscription to TapRooT® VI Software, our dynamic cloud-based software that computerizes the Equifactor® and TapRooT® Techniques.
CLICK HERE for the upcoming Equifactor® Course dates and locations (including virtual courses.
Or to get a quote for an Equifactor® Course at your site, CLICK HERE.
Don’t wait and suffer needless equipment failures and equipment downtime because you are not addressing the root causes of equipment problems.
