Abstract
Faults represent non-conformities in productive activities. Therefore, approaches to their mitigation are relevant. Risk management techniques enable effective company’s strategic planning and the adoption of process controls towards failure reduction and assurance of adequate occupational health and safety. This research purported to integrate four widespread techniques, which are usually applied as stand-alone tools, to provide a robust risk management approach. A literature review about Process Mapping, Preliminary Hazard Analysis (PHA), Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), and Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is provided and their integration feasibility is analyzed, followed by an application study in a shipyard located in Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil.
Highlights
The Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is a deductive failure analysis, drawn as a graphical representation of a process failure, which is connected to its causes through top down routes (Long et al, 2000), developing, as described by Dugan et al (2000), a logical tree where events are linked nodes represented by gate symbols, which describe the relationship between input and output events (i.e.: logical operators “and” and “or”, as appropriate)
The Preliminary Hazard Analysis (PHA) prioritizes the Process Mapping task, while the Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) analyzes each cause of a failure mode and its effect which has been identified in the FTA events
To validate the proposed technique integration procedure, we present a case study on a company specialized in offshore oil platform supply vessels (PSV) building
Summary
Failure is an incident in which an item does not perform an intended function (NASA, 1998). According Alvarenga et al (2013), the level mapping varies from a process main steps’ view, known as macrolevel flow, to detailed view, i.e. micro-level flow It is typically performed through the following steps: The Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is a deductive failure analysis in which one can analyze how undesired events (lower-level events) can lead to a system fail (top event). A literature review where each of the four techniques concepts are described; Through the Process Mapping, existing company processes are questioned, creating opportunities to identifying critical interfaces and to improve organizational performance. It enables the implementation of new and modern management techniques (Bolsson et al, 2013). The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 examines the research theoretical framework, discussing the concepts of each techniques that will be incorporated in the process of fault mapping; Section 3 analyzes the integration of the four techniques described in the previous section; Section 4 evaluates and validates the proposed procedure in a real application; and, in the Section 5, research findings are discussed and conclusions are presented
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