Tutorial

time to gather enough data to perform meaningful analysis.
The resulting implementation falls short of everyone’s
expectations.
What caused the problems in these examples? First, the
groups involved did not discuss and prioritize the list of goals
and expectations. Second, there was not objective FRACAS
leadership across the departments. Finally, effective executive
sponsorship verifying and tracking the goals did not exist.
4.4 Solution 2: How to identify and prioritize goals
To overcome the problems caused by a lack of prioritized
goals, several points must be considered while planning the
FRACAS. First, make sure all stakeholders, including
management, discuss and agree on the goals and expectations
of the FRACAS. Objective FRACAS leadership ensures that
all stakeholders’ goals are considered in the planning. Lastly,
determine which goals can be thoroughly accomplished in the
planned FRACAS, and make sure all stakeholders sign off on
the goal prioritization.
4.5 Challenge 3: Ineffective and inefficient data tracking
As mentioned previously, the key to an effective
FRACAS solution is the gathering and reporting of
meaningful data. This seems to suggest that the more data
gathered on an incident or failure, the better the FRACAS will
be. However, this is not necessarily the case. Too much data
may even prevent users from discovering meaningful trends
because they can’t “see the forest through the trees”.
For example, many legacy FRACAS solutions collect 80
or more fields of information when recording a failure.
Although much of this data is valuable, the ramifications of
gathering that much data can result in several problems.
If it takes customer support personnel recording an
incident five seconds to enter data in each field, they will
spend 400 seconds or 6.7 minutes filling out the form for all
80 fields of data, not including any research time. Soon, many
begin to feel that fully logging a problem is just too timeconsuming.
They start routinely skipping fields and not even
reporting some issues at all.
To prevent this, designers develop input screens that will
easily accept incident information. However, they often use
free-flowing text fields to allow customer support personnel to
type any information that they think is useful. The support
users, though, become confused and do not always know what
to enter. Consequently, they begin to include extraneous or
irrelevant data, sometimes just leaving the field blank. The
resulting “data” becomes unable to support any meaningful
analysis and manually scanning incidents for trends becomes a
tedious chore.
4.6 Solution 3: How to effectively manage data
To avoid the problems of inefficient and ineffective data
tracking, organizations will want to establish functional
procedures before data collection begins. Use of simple,
streamlined forms that store data in a central database is often
the best approach. Taking the time to train the FRACAS users
responsible for data entry helps to ensure that all important
data is entered correctly and efficiently. Reminding those
responsible for the failure data entry of the importance of
capturing the data at the time of failure and the long term
benefits to the organization that result from that timely data
capture is critical. Whenever possible, data capture should be
automated as well.
5. STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL FRACAS IMPLEMENTATION
While this tutorial has discussed three of the most
common challenges during FRACAS implementations, the
issues presented are not all-encompassing. Instead, they
outline typical problems that prevent a company, regardless of
industry, from realizing the dramatic results that can be
achieved with a FRACAS.
Few documented tools and techniques exist to aid the
successful implementation of a closed-loop analysis and
corrective action system. This set of steps for successful
FRACAS implementation is intended to help companies
overcome the obstacles outlined above. The eight step
approach is meant as a framework that can be modified as
needed to fit a specific situation.
5.1 Step 1: Define the goals and success factors
Defining the goals of all intended users and stakeholders
is the foundation for a successful FRACAS implementation.
Every step in the process of establishing a FRACAS will be
based upon this definition. A mistake or misunderstanding at
this step can have negative consequences later. Therefore,
implementations require a commitment to thorough research
and documentation is required as otherwise issues may not
come to light until months later.
To begin this process, hold a series of short team
meetings with each of the groups (as identified in Issue 1) and
the representative stakeholders within the FRACAS process.
Using general facilitation techniques, map out specific goals
or expectations of the FRACAS. Typical goals include
lowering maintenance costs, improving overall reliability, and
improving next generation product design. Be careful of the
common pitfall of moving off of goal establishment and into
detailed requirements. The purpose of this exercise is for each
group to reach a consensus on the priority of its main goals.
Once each group has set its primary goals, call a crossfunctional
meeting. One representative from each group and
an executive and/or management representative should attend
to review, consolidate, and prioritize the goals. During this
same meeting, attach what success realistically means for each
of these goals in concrete terms. For example, if a goal is to
lower maintenance costs, a quantifiable success factor may be
to reduce these costs by ten percent over the next 12 months.
At the conclusion of this meeting, each attendee signs a
document that lists the consolidated and prioritized goals
along with their success factors. This single technique will
immediately highlight the level of agreement between the
groups.
Finally, gain executive approval and support and have one
executive take overall ownership and support of the
implementation. Encourage that person to communicate the
4 – Cline & Stillwell 2012 AR&MS Tutorial Notes