Root cause analysis in engineering failures

Analysis of engineering failures is a complex process. It is a task that requires information from personnel having expertise in many areas. From the information gathered, a failure analyst needs to discover what was fundamentally responsible for the failure, termed as “root cause”, and to determine the sequence of events that led to the final failure. Root cause analysis not only helps in finding solutions to the immediate problem, but also provides valuable guidelines as to what needs to be done to prevent recurrence of similar failures in future. However, experience suggests that most failure analyses fall short of this goal. Also, it is seen that a significant number of failure analysts incorrectly use the term “root cause“ when what they really establish is the primary cause of failure or simple physical cause. Is this because the definition of “root cause“ not understood adequately? The author examines this aspect through a few service failure cases.