If you’re fixing the same failure twice, you never fixed it the first time.
There’s a failure mode more expensive than any breakdown. It’s the breakdown that keeps coming back. The conveyor that trips every 6 weeks. The pump seal that fails every other month. The motor that maintenance has replaced three times in two years. Each time, the team fixes it. Closes the work order. Moves on. And three weeks later, it’s back.
That’s not a maintenance problem. That’s an analysis problem. The symptom keeps getting treated. The cause never gets eliminated. Root Cause Analysis is the discipline that breaks that cycle. Not by working harder — but by asking better questions. Going deeper than the failed component. Finding the physical cause, the human cause, and the latent systemic cause that allowed the failure to happen in the first place.
Module 3 of the SquareMethods curriculum teaches your team to do exactly that. 5-Why. Fishbone. Fault Tree Analysis. Applied to real failures in your facility, with your cross-functional team in the room. And when the RCA is complete, the findings don’t sit in a report. They get captured in SquareMethods — as preventive job aids that protect the next technician from making the same mistake, on the same asset, in the same situation. That’s how institutional knowledge compounds instead of disappearing.
What failure in your plant has happened more than twice? Let us talk @SquareMethods
