Why do the same technical faults keep recurring?

When putting out fires becomes the norm

When a critical piece of equipment breaks down, the focus is rightly on getting production up and running again quickly. After all, the cost of downtime mounts up rapidly and customers expect their deliveries to arrive on time.

The risk arises when urgent interventions become a daily reality. Teams then become exceptionally good at resolving technical faults, but find less and less time to tackle the underlying causes.

Some typical signs:

• Technicians spend a large proportion of their time on urgent interventions
• Preventative maintenance tasks are postponed
• The same systems keep appearing in the fault statistics
• Operations and maintenance point the finger at each other as the cause of the problems
• Structural improvements are left unaddressed

The result? The whole company continues to work hard, but reliability hardly improves.

The problem usually does not lie with the machine

When breakdowns recur, the first instinct is often to seek a technical solution. A component is replaced, a setting adjusted or a machine recalibrated.

At Stanwick, however, we regularly find that the cause goes far beyond the technical fault itself. Recurring breakdowns are often the result of a combination of factors:

• Unclear agreements between operations and maintenance
• Missing or outdated standards
• Limited analysis of faults
• Insufficient ownership of daily inspections
• Problems that are resolved but not structurally addressed

It is therefore not necessarily the machine that causes the technical fault. Often, the fault exposes an underlying problem within the organisation.

From resolving technical faults to eliminating losses

Organisations that systematically improve their reliability look beyond simply repairing faults. They focus on identifying and eliminating the root causes of downtime, speed losses and quality issues.

At Stanwick, we’ve noticed that the biggest breakthroughs often occur when teams learn to view breakdowns differently – not as isolated incidents, but as signals of an underlying loss that needs to be addressed.

The focus then shifts from:

“How do we get the machine up and running again as quickly as possible?”

to:

“Why is this loss occurring and how do we ensure it doesn’t happen again?”

This way of thinking forms a key foundation of Maintenance Excellence: not trying to resolve more technical faults, but ensuring fewer occur in the first place.

A question to ponder

Take a look at the ten most common breakdowns in your company over the past year.

How many of these occurred more than once? And how many were subject to a root cause analysis and follow-up on improvement actions?

This blog is part of a series of insights on Maintenance Excellence.

In our next blog, we’ll highlight a loss that is underestimated in many organisations: the hidden cost of unplanned downtime. After all, the visible repair cost is often just the tip of the iceberg. We’ll examine the impact that unplanned downtime has on production, planning, delivery reliability, quality and, ultimately, on the company’s bottom line.

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