Concepts

Tasks

Settings

Setup Tasks for Failure Tracking

Before you can start using APM to track failures, you must define administration settings and set up scheduled actions. You can also populate APM with historical failures to act as a starting point for calculating statistics. APM’s mass update utility allows you to adjust the defaults for automatically creating failures in response to alarm states in indicators. This topic provides an overview of these tasks and links to more information.

Contents

Administration Settings

Scheduled Actions

Populating APM with Failure History

Adjusting Failure Settings on Indicator States

Administration Settings

Before you can start tracking failures, the following setup steps must be performed:

•	Define document numbering settings for failures. APM identifies each failure record with a failure number. You can define the format of the assigned failure numbers, failure and anomaly settings. For more information, see Setting the Numbering Format for Failures.

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Define the policy for charting indicator readings. APM records the indicator reading taken before a failure occurs and after it is resolved, as explained in Viewing the Indicators and Readings that Track a Failure. The indicator reading charting policies allow you to define the period before and after each failure for which readings are charted. For more information, see Setting Options for Charting Indicator Readings for Failures.

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Define failure types and classifications, which allow you to group failure modes and records. For example, useful failure types might be Electrical, Environmental, Mechanical, Operational, Safety, and so on. Examples of failure classifications are Lubrication, Operator Error, and Installation Defect. For more information, see Defining Failure or Anomaly Types and Classifications.

•	Define failure severities that can be assigned to failure records. For more information, see Defining Failure Severities.

•	Define failure action statuses to keep track of follow-up actions for failure records. For more information, see Defining Statuses for Failure Follow-up Actions.

•	Define the statuses used to track the progress of failure follow-up actions. For more information, see Defining Statuses for Failure Follow-up Actions.

•	Define the mitigation types used to describe and track temporary containment measures. For more information, see Defining Mitigation Types.

•	If you intend to evaluate failures’ suitability for root cause analysis, the RCA settings must be defined. For more information, see Setting up RCA Recommendation Thresholds.

Scheduled Actions

Use scheduled actions to periodically calculate failure statistics and remaining PF-intervals. The Calculate Failure Remaining PF Interval action updates the time remaining on PF intervals for all open failures. The Calculate Failure Statistics action calculates the TBF, TBR, and TTR on all failures that require it.

For more information about setting up scheduled actions, see Scheduling Actions.

Note: If necessary, you can also calculate statistics and PF intervals manually. However, it is not likely that you will need to do so unless you are testing a preproduction environment. For more information, see Manually Recalculating Failure Statistics and PF Intervals.

Populating APM with Failure History

There are two reasons for adding records of historical failures to APM. First, failure history is an important component of the asset’s information. Second, the failure history provides an accurate starting point for calculating statistics for new failures. If the failure history is not added, the TBF and TBR calculations for the initial failures will not reflect the asset’s previous failures.

While it is unlikely that you will have the time or resources to enter a record of every failure that has ever occurred, you can choose to enter a record of significant failures on key pieces of equipment or systems.

Failure history is entered into APM as follows:

1.	Create a new failure record from the site or asset. For more information, see Creating a Failure Record From Scratch. Optionally, you can link the failure to the work order tasks that resolved it. For more information, see Linking a Failure Record to a Work Document.

2.	Resolve the failure. For more information, see Resolving a Failure.

It is not necessary that the failure history be entered before you report new failures in APM. APM recalculates the TBF and TBR on the new failures as the history is added.

Adjusting Failure Settings on Indicator States

When failure tracking is turned on for an asset’s indicator alarm states, APM creates a failure record automatically whenever an alarm is acknowledged with the appropriate option. When you upgraded APM to a version that supports failure tracking, the following default values were applied to your existing indicator states:

•	Create a failure is turned on. A failure is created for all states other than the indicator’s normal state.

•	Failure severity is set to null. A failure severity is not defaulted to the indicator states.

Using the mass update utility that APM provides, you can change the failure settings for any asset and, if you wish, its descendants. You can also change individual indicator’s failure settings. For each alarm type, you can do the following:

•	Activate or deactivate automatic failure creation

•	Set a default failure severity

•	Activate or deactivate automatic creation of downtime incidents when failures occur

For more information, see Updating Failure Settings on Indicator States.