Mark Galley’s article, 3 Steps and 3 Tools that Organize and Improve your Problem Solving Capability, posted on Reliability Web, lists our the three steps to problem solving and some tools for predictive maintenance professionals and reliability engineers to improve their ways.  The three investigation steps to approaching a problem are:

1. What’s the Problem?
2. Why did it happen?
3. What should be done?

These are the three basic steps/questions that every reliability engineer and predictive maintenance professional ask themselves when they are faced with a problem. Step one is where the problem becomes defined, step two is the analysis of the problem, and step three is the brainstorming of solutions. To effectively solve problems, Mark says it is important for predictive maintenance professionals and reliability engineers to organize the investigation. He provides tools to do this:

1. Capture the Timeline – keep a log in chronological order of occurrences (date, time, description), this will help with the “why questions”. It will not give cause-and-effect – therefore a cause-effect-analysis will need to be done to correspond with the timeline.
2. Use Diagrams, Drawing, and Photos – visual tools can provide everyone with a common view of the issue and usually provide more contextual detail.
3. Review the Process – identify the processes that were in place before the failure occurred, this is important in order to prevent the incident from occurring again.

The three questions and tools should be implemented while the investigation process is underway. People in the predictive maintenance and reliability fields should refine their organizational skills, because by following these steps and documenting the investigation consistently will make for a quicker, clearer, more organized, and more effective investigation.