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Settings

Setting up APM for RCA

Before you can begin analyzing failures and problems, your APM environment must be set up to accommodate RCA. This topic explains the types of settings that are available to prepare for RCA analysis and provides links to detailed information.

Select the RCA Diagram Template

The style and colors used in the RCA diagram are determined by the template selected in RCA settings. You can choose from four templates provided by APM. An administrator can also copy one of the supplied templates and customize it for your needs. For more information, see Selecting the RCA Diagram Template.

Define RCA Recommendation Thresholds

Using the RCA view in the Failure window, you can evaluate a failure’s suitability for root cause analysis. The evaluation produces one of these recommendations:

•	RCA not required

•	RCA recommended

•	RCA required

Set up the recommendation thresholds in the RCA settings. For more information, see Setting up RCA Recommendation Thresholds.

Set up Consequence (Risk) Severities

Severities for health and safety, economic, and environmental consequences are used to evaluate failures for RCA. APM comes with basic severities for each of the categories. You can add impact statements, adjust severities as needed, and add your own.

See Setting up Severities.

Customize Criticality Terminology (Optional)

You can customize the labels shown in anomaly events, risk assessments, asset risk summaries, and analysis reports. For example, everywhere that “Economic” appears, you could have “Financial” displayed. The labels and their default values are:

•	Probability of failure – “Probability”

•	Economic severity – “Economic”

•	Health and safety severity – “Health and Safety”

•	Environmental severity – “Environmental”

•	Reputation severity – “Reputation”

•	Consequence of failure – “Consequence priority”

•	Confidence – “Confidence”

For more information, see Customizing Criticality Terminology.

Set up Failure Mode Consequence Priorities

Consequence priorities, including the rules that assign RCA ranking scores, are required to evaluate failures for RCA. APM comes with defined priorities. You will need to add RCA scores to them.

For more information, see Setting up Consequence Priorities.

Set up Failure Severities

Failure severities for potential, partial, and full failures are used to evaluate failures for RCA. Assign each severity a sequence number to indicate its ranking, as well as a number to indicate the seriousness for RCA.

For more information, see Defining Failure Severities.

Set up Probability of Recurrence Values

Probabilities of recurrence include scores to be used in calculating the failure’s criticality index.

For more information, see Setting up Probability of Recurrence Values for RCA.

Define Analysis Statuses and Events

Your organization can use analysis statuses to track the progress of analyses in APM. The status can determine the actions that can be performed on an analysis. For example, an analysis with the status “New” can have its properties changed, or the status “Implemented” could mean that the analysis is completed and no more changes can be made. You can allow statuses to be manually applied to analyses. You can also link statuses to events, such as “creation” or “sent for approval”. The status changes automatically when a linked event occurs.

You can set up workflow controls that automatically change the status when a certain action occurs with an analysis. For example, when the analysis is created, the status could be set to “New analysis” automatically.

For more information, see Setting up RCA Analysis Statuses and Setting up RCA Events: Rules for Assigning Statuses.

Define Analysis Types

Analysis types allow RCA records to be grouped for easy identification. At a basic level, the most useful root cause analysis types are “proactive” and “reactive”. You can create as many types as your organization needs.

For more information, see Setting up RCA Analysis Types.

Define Cause Classifications

An optional step in the analysis is to evaluate causes in terms of immediate and basic causes and lack of control. For each of these, you can provide descriptions and select the underlying causal factors, such as “Defective equipment and tools”.

For information about setting up this feature, see Setting up Cause Classifications for RCA.

Define Checklist Items

An analysis checklist is a list of “things to do” to remind the team of the steps they need to consider when performing the analysis. For each item that you add to APM settings, you can specify the varieties of analysis it applies to, identify it with an icon, and provide a description.

When recording an analysis, you can mark analysis checklist items as “Performed” and provide comments for them. APM records the employee who checked off the item, the date, and time. The analysis team can view the status of checklist items in the analysis window, Properties view, Checklist tab.

For more information, see Setting up RCA Checklist Items.

Set up Document Numbering

Define document numbering settings for failures and root cause analyses. You can define the format of the assigned numbers, as you can with other documents, by accessing the Document Numbering Settings dialog from the site’s Administration menu.

Tip: The Document Numbering Settings dialog also shows the number that APM will automatically assign to the next failure and RCA that is created.

For more information, see Setting the Numbering Format for RCA Analyses.