All Member Open Forum

What is the generally accepted work load that your industry works towards with reliability professional's?   

1. How many RCA's per year?  This can be dependent whether it's a major or mini type RCA of course
2. How many Defect Eliminations?
3. What is your industry?

I'm trying to find some benchmarking to understand where my teams are lacking.   At this time, it is not uncommon for a single reliability professional to be working on 3-6 RCA's at any given time and completing up to 30 RCA's per year (major and mini 40/60 split).  And this is before the other reliability duties are factored in.   

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Kevin
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Generally, I would expect an experienced Reliability Engineer to manage about 1 RCI per month in the petrochemical industry. More than that and I doubt you are really able to spend the time needed to do a robust investigation (or as you've noted, they are only doing RCI's and no other reliability activities). I would look hard at the criteria you are using to determine when an RCI is needed. I suspect you are doing a lot of RCI's on lower consequence failures and many of those probably have fairly obvious causes where the RCI is adding minimal value.

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Matthew Hiatt PE
Dow Chemical
Hahnville LA
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Original Message:
Sent: 09-29-2023 02:21 PM
From: Kevin Riner
Subject: Reliability professional work load - RCA's/Defects

What is the generally accepted work load that your industry works towards with reliability professional's?   

1. How many RCA's per year?  This can be dependent whether it's a major or mini type RCA of course
2. How many Defect Eliminations?
3. What is your industry?

I'm trying to find some benchmarking to understand where my teams are lacking.   At this time, it is not uncommon for a single reliability professional to be working on 3-6 RCA's at any given time and completing up to 30 RCA's per year (major and mini 40/60 split).  And this is before the other reliability duties are factored in.   

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Kevin
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Kevin,

My industry since 2001 has been energy, producing, distributing, and storing electrons, renewables and carbon. 
Instead of a target number, seek value. If 12, 30 or more RCA are performed per year but produce no return on investment (ROI), then arguing for more RCA becomes a challenge. If fewer than 12 are performed over the year and the results offer elimination or reduction of defects in the facility's vital few (Pareto), the ROI will prove the value and gain more support for the efforts. You are correct that major or minor has impact.

If the defect is a digital thermometer causing variation of data across the facility, the RCA might be as simple as a Reliability Technician finding the variation with one manufacturer. The Technician reports this to Contracts. An online search performed by Contracts discovers the manufacturer has a recent history of thermometers regularly indicating five to seven percent out off, both high and low. The Contract Specialist switches future orders to another manufacturer from the same supplier. The cost is a few hours of the Technician and Specialist, a few hundred dollars. The ROI is a small improvement of reliability but across the entire facility equating several thousand dollars. 

If the defect is a turbine in constant high temperature alarm, the RCA will involve multiple personnel, several teams, and probably weeks or more to find the root cause and determine how to mitigate or eliminate the defect. The cost of the RCA will be high. The ROI is increased mean time between failure (MTBF) and possibly save lives because hot turbines might lead to catastrophic failures. 

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Larry James
Lockout Larry
1. Personnel 2. Environment 3. Equipment 4. Revenue
Reno NV
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Original Message:
Sent: 09-29-2023 02:21 PM
From: Kevin Riner
Subject: Reliability professional work load - RCA's/Defects

What is the generally accepted work load that your industry works towards with reliability professional's?   

1. How many RCA's per year?  This can be dependent whether it's a major or mini type RCA of course
2. How many Defect Eliminations?
3. What is your industry?

I'm trying to find some benchmarking to understand where my teams are lacking.   At this time, it is not uncommon for a single reliability professional to be working on 3-6 RCA's at any given time and completing up to 30 RCA's per year (major and mini 40/60 split).  And this is before the other reliability duties are factored in.   

------------------------------
Kevin
------------------------------

I would expect around 12 full/detailed RCFA per year as an average.   These may take 1-3 months of investigation and analysis to complete so the RE may have 3-5 open at one time.  The experience level of the RE is also a large factor.  A veteran can do 2-3 times more quality RCFA than an inexperienced RE.

May also contribute to other RCFA or do some mini RCFA (those that may only take a few days) as well during the year.  

As others have said it is all about quality and getting a return from the resources invested.  

The other thing is what other things are on the RE plate?  Some companies will push the RE to execute maintenance improvement projects or even capital projects.  This will affect the number and quality of RCFA.

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Randy Riddell, CMRP, PSAP, CLS
Reliability Manager
Essity
Cherokee AL
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 09-29-2023 02:21 PM
From: Kevin Riner
Subject: Reliability professional work load - RCA's/Defects

What is the generally accepted work load that your industry works towards with reliability professional's?   

1. How many RCA's per year?  This can be dependent whether it's a major or mini type RCA of course
2. How many Defect Eliminations?
3. What is your industry?

I'm trying to find some benchmarking to understand where my teams are lacking.   At this time, it is not uncommon for a single reliability professional to be working on 3-6 RCA's at any given time and completing up to 30 RCA's per year (major and mini 40/60 split).  And this is before the other reliability duties are factored in.   

------------------------------
Kevin
------------------------------

Hey Kevin,

I'd reiterate what Matthew, Larry and Randy have said above regarding the typical number of RCAs (my industry is minerals processing / fixed plant mining).

I've found many facilities churn out RCAs where the actions are never executed or tracked, and ordering an RCA is the default response from the management team when downtime occurs. Having set criteria for different investigation types like Matthew suggested, that is agreed to by the leadership team, can mitigate this somewhat. I've seen this work well with increased production impacts requiring more in-depth investigation, assuming the root cause isn't evident.

I also wanted to build on what Larry said about ROI. If your RCA actions are prioritized and feed into your defect elimination program, your bottleneck may be fixing the problems (eliminating the defects), not the number of RCAs your team can complete. 

I also understand your team members need KPIs to measure performance, but as someone who previously worked in a team with #RCAs as a target, it didn't drive the right behaviors. A measurement of defects eliminated in reduction of process downtime might be a better measure for effectiveness of your REs? Just a passing thought - interested to hear what others think.

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Benjamin Prior CMRP, BEng, MBA
Principal
Priority Consulting Inc
Berkeley CA
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 09-29-2023 02:21 PM
From: Kevin Riner
Subject: Reliability professional work load - RCA's/Defects

What is the generally accepted work load that your industry works towards with reliability professional's?   

1. How many RCA's per year?  This can be dependent whether it's a major or mini type RCA of course
2. How many Defect Eliminations?
3. What is your industry?

I'm trying to find some benchmarking to understand where my teams are lacking.   At this time, it is not uncommon for a single reliability professional to be working on 3-6 RCA's at any given time and completing up to 30 RCA's per year (major and mini 40/60 split).  And this is before the other reliability duties are factored in.   

------------------------------
Kevin
------------------------------

Thank you all for the responses.   

For my team, we work in power generation and we do have criteria in place that we use to trigger the RCA process.   Unexpected unit trips, 20% derate, environmental exceedances of any kind, critical asset loss, etc.   We will also conduct smaller RCA's as needed depending on the circumstance.  

Benjamin - I agree and we do not have a KPI in place for my team members to hit a specific number of RCA's per year.  That was something we had in the past as well and yes, it drove wrong behavior and the quality of the RCA's was not good. 

One thing we are working to improve and provide more visualization around is the corrective actions that come from an RCA and how to better track the process of them being completed.  The RCA teams have done a great job identifying corrective measures but the follow through of completing these corrections in a timely matter is where we run into issues.  

My questions were asked so that I could look at what others are doing to ensure my team is right sized with the amount of work in front of us.   My team gets RCA's completed and those should help guide and feed into defect elimination methods but often we don't have time to dive in like we should to follow through.  

------------------------------
Kevin
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 11-07-2023 07:20 PM
From: Benjamin Prior
Subject: Reliability professional work load - RCA's/Defects

Hey Kevin,

I'd reiterate what Matthew, Larry and Randy have said above regarding the typical number of RCAs (my industry is minerals processing / fixed plant mining).

I've found many facilities churn out RCAs where the actions are never executed or tracked, and ordering an RCA is the default response from the management team when downtime occurs. Having set criteria for different investigation types like Matthew suggested, that is agreed to by the leadership team, can mitigate this somewhat. I've seen this work well with increased production impacts requiring more in-depth investigation, assuming the root cause isn't evident.

I also wanted to build on what Larry said about ROI. If your RCA actions are prioritized and feed into your defect elimination program, your bottleneck may be fixing the problems (eliminating the defects), not the number of RCAs your team can complete. 

I also understand your team members need KPIs to measure performance, but as someone who previously worked in a team with #RCAs as a target, it didn't drive the right behaviors. A measurement of defects eliminated in reduction of process downtime might be a better measure for effectiveness of your REs? Just a passing thought - interested to hear what others think.

------------------------------
Benjamin Prior CMRP, BEng, MBA
Principal
Priority Consulting Inc
Berkeley CA

Original Message:
Sent: 09-29-2023 02:21 PM
From: Kevin Riner
Subject: Reliability professional work load - RCA's/Defects

What is the generally accepted work load that your industry works towards with reliability professional's?   

1. How many RCA's per year?  This can be dependent whether it's a major or mini type RCA of course
2. How many Defect Eliminations?
3. What is your industry?

I'm trying to find some benchmarking to understand where my teams are lacking.   At this time, it is not uncommon for a single reliability professional to be working on 3-6 RCA's at any given time and completing up to 30 RCA's per year (major and mini 40/60 split).  And this is before the other reliability duties are factored in.   

------------------------------
Kevin
------------------------------

Agree with you on the challenge of getting corrective actions completed.  It is a challenge everywhere.  The thing is with RCFA is that being a series process, any miss in that series link of activities from having the right system, right resources, right evidence, right analysis and right action items and the entire RCFA process fails.  You are rightly focused to make sure you have the right resources and action item system in place to execute successfully.  Look at the other areas as well to make sure you have the right system for your organization and the RCFA team is getting the right evidence and executing the right analysis to get to root causes.  An error anywhere will fail the entire process.

For example, If an RCFA solves the wrong problem (or incorrect failure mode) then action items are a waste of time and will not solve the specific failure occuring.  The failure is likely to repeat again.  This is one way a failure becomes a chronic failure problem.  It is always a shame to see a good RCFA executed all the way to the end but then fail to get the action items complete correctly and then the failure happens again.  If it isn't finished it doesn't produce any real results.

I have seen corrective action items tracked in spreadsheets, databases, WO CMMS systems, etc.  The main thing is to have a system to track, assign an owner and a way to review or audit the list.  Find a way that your organization can execute.  Not everyone can be successful the same way and that goes for all stages of the RCFA process.

You are taking a good approach to address RCFA effectiveness.  RCFA is one of the most challenging and interesting reliability activities that we do.  Doing it well if also very rewarding,  Good luck on your journey.  

------------------------------
Randy Riddell, CMRP, PSAP, CLS
Reliability Manager
Essity
Cherokee AL
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 11-08-2023 08:22 AM
From: Kevin Riner
Subject: Reliability professional work load - RCA's/Defects

Thank you all for the responses.   

For my team, we work in power generation and we do have criteria in place that we use to trigger the RCA process.   Unexpected unit trips, 20% derate, environmental exceedances of any kind, critical asset loss, etc.   We will also conduct smaller RCA's as needed depending on the circumstance.  

Benjamin - I agree and we do not have a KPI in place for my team members to hit a specific number of RCA's per year.  That was something we had in the past as well and yes, it drove wrong behavior and the quality of the RCA's was not good. 

One thing we are working to improve and provide more visualization around is the corrective actions that come from an RCA and how to better track the process of them being completed.  The RCA teams have done a great job identifying corrective measures but the follow through of completing these corrections in a timely matter is where we run into issues.  

My questions were asked so that I could look at what others are doing to ensure my team is right sized with the amount of work in front of us.   My team gets RCA's completed and those should help guide and feed into defect elimination methods but often we don't have time to dive in like we should to follow through.  

------------------------------
Kevin

Original Message:
Sent: 11-07-2023 07:20 PM
From: Benjamin Prior
Subject: Reliability professional work load - RCA's/Defects

Hey Kevin,

I'd reiterate what Matthew, Larry and Randy have said above regarding the typical number of RCAs (my industry is minerals processing / fixed plant mining).

I've found many facilities churn out RCAs where the actions are never executed or tracked, and ordering an RCA is the default response from the management team when downtime occurs. Having set criteria for different investigation types like Matthew suggested, that is agreed to by the leadership team, can mitigate this somewhat. I've seen this work well with increased production impacts requiring more in-depth investigation, assuming the root cause isn't evident.

I also wanted to build on what Larry said about ROI. If your RCA actions are prioritized and feed into your defect elimination program, your bottleneck may be fixing the problems (eliminating the defects), not the number of RCAs your team can complete. 

I also understand your team members need KPIs to measure performance, but as someone who previously worked in a team with #RCAs as a target, it didn't drive the right behaviors. A measurement of defects eliminated in reduction of process downtime might be a better measure for effectiveness of your REs? Just a passing thought - interested to hear what others think.

------------------------------
Benjamin Prior CMRP, BEng, MBA
Principal
Priority Consulting Inc
Berkeley CA

Original Message:
Sent: 09-29-2023 02:21 PM
From: Kevin Riner
Subject: Reliability professional work load - RCA's/Defects

What is the generally accepted work load that your industry works towards with reliability professional's?   

1. How many RCA's per year?  This can be dependent whether it's a major or mini type RCA of course
2. How many Defect Eliminations?
3. What is your industry?

I'm trying to find some benchmarking to understand where my teams are lacking.   At this time, it is not uncommon for a single reliability professional to be working on 3-6 RCA's at any given time and completing up to 30 RCA's per year (major and mini 40/60 split).  And this is before the other reliability duties are factored in.   

------------------------------
Kevin
------------------------------