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Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
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May 2020 #12250 Page #64
Six Steps of Troubleshooting Methodology and Why It’s Important By Brian Zengel
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s technology advances year after year and Alpine equipment becomes more sophisticated, it’s critical to understand some best practices when troubleshooting equipment.
In a perfect world, equipment would never break down and therefore never be a need to troubleshoot. Unfortunately, we still live in a world that has equipment breakdowns that require troubleshooting. Some troubleshooting is scheduled, but the majority of troubleshooting is performed during unscheduled breakdowns. Unscheduled downtime creates a cascading effect that disrupts the entire production workflow. The more efficient the troubleshooting, the less impact the downtime will have on the production workflow. Alpine Equipment Support has been utilizing a Six Step process as part of our Troubleshooting Methodology. The process flow gives Alpine and our customer’s maintenance team a way to find and fix problems faster, reduce downtime, track reoccurring problems, and reduce labor.
Six Steps of Troubleshooting Step #1 – Problem Identification In most cases, what you witness first as the “problem” is just a symptom of the root cause. The first step in the troubleshooting process is to identify the problem area. As you start to determine the problem area, you need to ask A LOT of questions. Example: Did the problem show up during start up? Was there a crash/damage to the equipment before the problem? How about PM or service part replacement work prior to the problem? Only work on one problem at a time. Start with the biggest pain point and work on it until it’s resolved, then start on the next problem. In some cases, you may think there are multiple problems, but once you fix the root cause, the others might be symptoms. Step #2 – Establish Theory of Probable Cause The second step in the process is to create a list of probable causes. It is good to document this list on paper (or electronically). The list allows you to document ideas from your head, so you don’t miss anything. It also allows you to segment the ideas from highest to lowest probable cause. Step #3 – Establish Plan of Action Once a list of probable causes has been created, it’s now time for an action plan. The third step in the process is to create the action plan. There are some areas to think about when creating the action plan. First, you want to review the probable causes and determine if you need different personnel working on the plan. Do you need an IT specialist or maybe an electrician? Testing equipment/ Continued next page
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