FRACAS (Failure Reporting, Analysis and Corrective Action System)

FRACAS is a closed-loop process that gives companies a way to succinctly report, analyze, and correct production failures. Enormous benefits are enjoyed by the companies that choose to manage their reliability engineering with FRACAS. Some of them include:

• It provides failure data and both corrective and preventative action solutions for reliability analysis.
• It’s able to identify problematic developments in patterns and deficiencies.
• It is needed for certification and audits.
• It gathers all the data into one place for users to look back on, preventing them from repeating the same mistakes.

FRACAS can be used for projects such as all initial product designs, development and field testing, production and operations, and countless more objectives. Now, there are three steps to completing FRACAS successfully:

• Failure reporting is done by using a failure or defective report and should include what failed, how it’s failing, the testing and operating conditions, and the time when it stopped working.
• Analysis must be completed via a root cause analysis to successfully identify what caused the equipment or process to fail.
• Corrective action is the last step and takes place only after the root cause of the failure has been determined. All corrective and preventative actions must be recorded and filed away.

FRACAS can be integrated with DMAIC and 8D management approaches to fully round out the reliability engineering program of a facility. In fact, nowadays, this method is able to be used completely online via a special software made for this purpose. Getting digitally organized and ridding the area of stacks upon stacks of papers makes the needed information easy to access and is somewhat automated. This frees up employees’ time for other important tasks.