Why a detailed fault description is so important

June 23, 2010

An often overlooked solution to getting repairs completed more reliably and faster is a detailed fault description. Many times, when maintenance departments send their Industrial Electronic equipment out for repair, they often bypass the fault description. Even those maintenance personnel that attach tags to their failed equipment don’t always require their technicians put down an accurate, detailed description of the failure. This doesn't seem like a priority at a time when your machine is down and production has stopped, but taking a few minutes to communicate the fault can be extremely valuable to the repair technicians. It comes down to this. Documenting an accurate, detailed fault description can save you time and money and help provide a higher quality and much more reliable Industrial Electronic repair.

Lets look at a couple of real life examples:

1. An emergency hard down situation.Your machine has gone down and your maintenance personnel have done their troubleshooting and determined that the drive that controls one of the motors is the most likely failure. You don’t have a spare and a new drive must be built by the manufacturer and won’t ship for 9-12 weeks. Your only option is to send it to your repair house and request an expedited repair. You get it to them and they begin their troubleshooting, but the only thing you have communicated is that it is not working. It has a tag that reads "Broke" or "Not working" or "Failed" or any other very ambiguous description. The repair technician sees no visual evidence of failure, so that technician has to start testing and troubleshooting every section of the unit to find the problem. This can be very time consuming.The entire time, your company is losing money, because you are not making product, your production line is still down.Not to mention the fact that the Plant Manager is camped out in your office for anxiously waiting for your updates. Had your repair vendor been informed that the drive was not communicating with feedback circuit from the encoder on the motor, the technician could have gone right to that area, troubleshooting only that area of the drive and only those components. This would have fixed your drive in a fraction of the time and your line would have been up and running much, much sooner.

2. Much more often what happens is you have a failure and the problem is discovered.The failed unit is replaced by one of the spares on your shelf and your production is quickly restored and all is well....for the time being. Over the next few months this happens a few more times and your inventory of spares gets critically low. Now you have to go to the pile of failed units and send them out to get repaired, but you can’t remember what the symptoms were, so the fault description again reads “Not Working” or "Failed" or "Broke". Your repair vendor gets them and quotes you in the maximum repair cost, because they know they are going to have to spend substantially more time troubleshooting and repairing the fault. Additionally, the likelihood of overlooking something increases when the area of fault is unknown, because even a tested unit may not reveal intermittent problems like the operational stress of high machine duty cycles or limited ventilation causing overheating.

Send a detailed fault description and save yourself hours of headaches and hairpulling stress.

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