August 3, 2026 | Justin Clark

“I want them to think Reliability”: Who’s Who in Equifactor®

I keep hearing reliability leaders want to train the extended team to think with reliability in mind. NO! STOP!

You do NOT want your operators to become failure experts.

You do NOT want maintenance personnel to be failure experts.

You do NOT need new Engineers to be failure experts.

Technical experts should be the failure experts, and THEY should be writing Equifactor® Tables for the rest of the organization. Operators and maintenance teams need to know what to look for when they see a given machine or equipment fail. Quit trying to teach them how to reason their way to the answer. Give them exactly what they need to look for to prove the failure and get the plant back online with no repeat downtime.

Technical experts and your most experienced operators are the two pillars of troubleshooting guidance.

Technical experts use FME(C)As and historical troubleshooting data to produce systems and design issues to look for: design criteria, design-level accidents, and technical data they see from every site.

Operators see all the human issues of equipment failures: installation issues, improper maintenance, deviations from the operating envelope, Human Factors not covered by the FME(C)A.

This isn’t theoretical:

What equipment goes offline?
What did you find that led to that specific downtime?

If you don’t have that data, your troubleshooting program needs improvement. You must understand the equipment failure before you can prevent it, and especially before you can tell a new technician what to look for when they see the same symptoms.

Equifactor® Equipment Troubleshooting is an equipment troubleshooting framework with both general and specific guidance for troubleshooters to first prove, then prevent equipment failures of any type. Get to the next Equifactor® Course to learn how problem-solving professionals