Detailed review of: Root Cause Analysis: Improving Performance for Bottom-Line Results | Publishers | : | CRC Press/Taylor & Francis Group | | Editor | : | Robert J. Latino & Kenneth C. Latino | | Title | : | Root Cause Analysis: Improving Performance for Bottom-Line Results | | Year of Publication | : | 2006 | | Pages | : | 266 | | ISBN | : | 0849353408 | | Reviewer | : | Krishna B. Misra | | Status | : | Review published in IJPE, Vol. 4, No. 2, April 2008, p. 199. |
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The book consists of 13 chapters as follows: Chapter 1: Introduction to PROACT Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Work | 16 Pages | Chapter 2: Introduction to the Field of Root Cause Analysis | 10 Pages | Chapter 3: Creating the Environment for RCA to Succeed:The Reliability Performance Process | 16 Pages | Chapter 4: Failure Classification | 8 Pages | Chapter 5: Opportunity Analysis: "The Manual Approach" | 20 Pages | Chapter 6: Asset Performance Management Systems (APMS) | 14 Pages | Chapter 7: The PROACT RCA Methodology | 20 Pages | Chapter 8: Ordering the Analysis Team | 12 Pages | Chapter 9: Analyzing the Data: Introducing the PROACT Logic Tree | 22 Pages | Chapter 10: Communicating Findings and Recommendations | 14 Pages | Chapter 11: Tracking for Bottom-Line Results | 12 Pages | Chapter 12: Automating Root Cause Analysis:The Utilization of the PROACT Enterprise Version 3.0+ | 44 Pages | Chapter 13: Case Histories | 52 Pages | Index | 6 Pages | |
| This book brings the rich experience of a family devoted to practicing reliability over several years. The authors run a consulting firm (RCI) started by their father and have piled up experience of teaching and mentoring of several analysts in the PROACT methodology. The authors claim to discuss Root Cause Analysis (RCA) in this book in the style of teaching a workshop while indicating how RCA fits in with the initiatives like TQM, RE, RCM and Six Sigma. RCA is particularly important and useful for a large asset-intensive company. The book explains how and when to go about applying RCA and sets a strategy to direct personnel to do it in such a company. Once a strategy map of the company is created considering various perspectives such as corporate, assets, work practices, knowledge and experience, which vary from company to company, it requires relating the higher level objectives to lower level objectives. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are carefully selected and monitored to measure the effectiveness of a maintenance and reliability program. A score board serves to indicate which events are contributing to poor performance. Several definitions have been put forward by various analysts but the simplest way to define it is a structured approach of WHAT underlying causes need to be fixed, not HOW to fix them. All undesirable events have their roots embedded in physical, human and latent areas. RCA aims to dig them out and help implement corrective actions and thereby improve upon the bottom-line results. Much of the portion of this book devoted to PROACT methodology and software developed by RCI. The book presents case histories from 6 US companies covering over 52 pages (nearly 20 per cent of the book), which makes this book useful to a practicing reliability and maintenance engineers. The reviewer would like to recommend this book to all reliability and maintenance engineers for a serious look at the material presented in the book and to reliability schools for graduating engineering students. It is good book that explains the root cause analysis approach to engineering systems. Krishna B. Misra
Review published in the International Journal of Performability Engineering, Vol. 4, No. 2, April 2008, p. 199. i
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