Failure Analysis Guide: 7 Steps to Preventing Future Breakdowns

You’re in charge of what feels like an impossible task — to break the cycle of repeat equipment failures at your organization. But the answer to your problem lies in two simple words: failure analysis (FA). Failure analysis isn’t just a post-mortem on a failed part. It’s the systematic, data-driven process we use to transform every breakdown into strategic business intelligence. 

The goal is simple: Move beyond fixing the symptom and attack the root cause of failure to ensure it never happens again. Companies in sectors from aerospace to automotive use FA to prevent future failures. Here’s how.

What Is Failure Analysis (FA)?

First, let’s start by defining failure analysis. It’s the systematic investigation of a component, equipment or process failure to determine the fundamental cause of failure. It’s a multidisciplinary approach, often involving material science, reliability engineering and data analysis, to understand the environment, the mechanism and the location of the failure. This process is crucial for preventing costly product failures and improving manufacturing processes.

The core goal of failure analysis is to shift teams from a reactive maintenance culture to one of preventive maintenance (PM) and reliability. Instead of asking, “How do we get it running?” we ask, “What is the single change we can make to our system to prevent this from ever happening again?”

A robust FA process relies on three key components:

• Failure mode: This is what the failure looks like on the surface. For example, “The pump stopped running” or “The compressor tripped on overload.”
• Failure mechanism: This is the physical, chemical or mechanical process that causes the failure. For example, “Fatigue cracking in the shaft,” “Abrasive wear on the gear teeth” or “Corrosion due to water ingress.”
• Root cause: This is the underlying systemic or management flaw that allowed the mechanism to exist. For example, “PM procedure did not specify the correct lubricant,” “No formal operator training on shut-down procedure” or “Design flaw in the mounting bracket.”

7 Steps to Mastering Failure Analysis

Failure analysis is not a checklist; it’s a structured investigation. While different methodologies exist, the best practice process follows this sequence:

1. Secure the Scene & Define the Problem 

This first step is critical: Secure the scene and preserve the evidence. A maintenance technician’s instinct is often to immediately disassemble and clean the failed part, but this can destroy crucial evidence like contamination, crack origin or misalignment. We must define the problem clearly: What failed? When did it fail? What was the equipment doing at the time?

2. Collect & Preserve Data & Evidence 

This is where we gather both quantitative and qualitative data.

• Quantitative data: Pull work order history, sensor data (temperature, vibration, pressure), asset age and recent meter readings from your computerized maintenance management system (CMMS).
• Qualitative data: Conduct thorough interviews with machine operators and technicians. This step is key to a complete failure investigation.

3. Establish a Timeline of Events 

Use the collected data to build a chronological sequence of events, working backward from the moment of functional failure. Look for recent changes, like a new PM procedure, a shift in the supply chain or a new operator. This timeline should show the chain reaction that led to the event.

4. Determine Failure Mode & Mechanism 

At this stage, we examine the failed component failures using powerful failure analysis techniques like scanning electron microscopy, mechanical testing or X-ray analysis. This often involves sending parts out for specialized failure analysis services. If the part is an electronic component or made of polymers, a specialized lab is often required. We often use nondestructive testing (NDT) techniques first to examine the part without altering it.

5. Conduct Root Cause Analysis (RCA) 

Once we know the failure mechanism, we use RCA methodologies to find the systemic cause. Popular failure analysis methods include the 5 Whys and fault tree analysis. Troubleshooting a problem requires you to find the root cause of failure to prevent recurrence.

The 5 Whys method forces us to drill down past the symptom to the final management system failure:

1. Failure mechanism: Why did the bearing fail?
   • Answer: Because it overheated.
2. Intermediate cause 1: Why did it overheat?
   • Answer: Because the lubrication was poor.
3. Intermediate cause 2: Why was the lubrication poor?
   • Answer: Because the technician used the wrong grease.
4. Human error: Why did the technician use the wrong grease?
   • Answer: Because the grease gun was mislabeled.
5. Root cause: Why was the grease gun mislabeled?
   • Answer: Because our tool crib labeling SOP is missing a verification step.

6. Develop Corrective & Preventive Actions (CAPA) 

The investigation is useless without action. We must develop two sets of actions:

• Corrective actions: The immediate fixes (i.e., replace the failed bearing and the mislabeled grease gun)
• Preventive actions: The permanent system fix (i.e., implement a new, required two-person verification step for all tool crib labeling)

7. Verify, Implement & Share the Solution 

The final step is to apply the fix, track the results and, crucially, share the findings and the new standard operating procedure (SOP) across the entire organization. This closes the loop and prevents the same failure from happening to similar assets.

Understanding the 3 Types of Failure

Not all failures are created equal. Knowing the failure pattern helps us choose the right strategy. We commonly categorize failures into three types based on the asset’s “life”:

1. Early life failures (infant mortality): These happen shortly after installation, commissioning or repair.
   • Cause: Often linked to poor workmanship, faulty components from the supply chain or incorrect setup.
   • Strategy: Focus quality control efforts on initial setup and thorough training
2. Random failures: These occur unpredictably during the asset’s steady, useful life phase.
   • Cause: Typically caused by external factors, such as accidental overloading, a sudden drop or a lightning strike. They are the “blips” in the asset’s stable period.
   • Strategy: Implement advanced monitoring and protective devices. No amount of traditional PM can prevent a random lightning strike, but good fuses can mitigate the effect.
3. Wear-out failures: These failures occur near the end of the asset’s expected lifespan.
   • Cause: They are the result of expected degradation mechanisms like metal fatigue, corrosion, or abrasive wear. The original product design often dictates this lifespan.
   • Strategy: These are the ideal targets for time-based preventive maintenance schedules and condition monitoring. If we know a pump’s mean time between failure is five years, we schedule the overhaul at 4.5 years.

Failure Analysis as a Quality Control Measure

Failure analysis is more than just a repair tool; it’s an embedded quality control (QC) mechanism for the entire maintenance operation. It forces us to treat every time a product fails as a data point for system improvement, not just a nuisance. This continuous loop is vital in high-stakes environments like medical devices manufacturing.

Example 1: Using FMEA to Prioritize Risk

The most powerful QC application is the proactive use of failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA). Instead of waiting for a failure, an FMEA team identifies potential failures across a system, assigns a risk score and mitigates the highest-priority risks before they occur. This is a core function of reliability engineering.

We do this by calculating the risk priority number (RPN) for every potential failure mode:

If we analyze a new steam valve and determine a failure mode has high Severity (safety hazard) and low Detection (NDT not performed), we get a high RPN, even if the Occurrence is low. This flags the risk as a top priority for QC. Our corrective action may not be a PM, but an engineering fix, such as installing a reliable sensor to increase Detection.

Example 2: Auditing Repair Procedures With RCA Data

When we track our RCA findings, we often see a Pareto distribution — 80 percent of our chronic failures come from 20 percent of the root causes. If our RCA data repeatedly shows that failures are caused by “improper setup” or “deviation from procedure” (a human or process root cause), our QC target is clear: fix the SOP. This provides rich case studies for training.

For instance, if electrical maintenance problems keep recurring due to loose wiring:

1. FA reveals: Loose terminal screws.
2. RCA reveals: The initial installation checklist didn’t require a calibrated torque wrench.
3. QC Fix: We update the SOP for terminal tightening, make a calibrated wrench mandatory and add a sign-off on the work order app to verify the tool was used. This also flags a need for materials testing on the wiring itself.

This is how FA moves from fixing single component failures to auditing and improving the quality of the maintenance process itself. Many firms offer engineering services to help with these systemic fixes.

How Coast Streamlines Your Failure Analysis Process

Effective failure analysis hinges on three things: preserving evidence, centralizing data and standardizing the fix. If your data is scattered across spreadsheets, paper forms and email, Step 2 (Data Collection) and Step 3 (Timeline Creation) become a tedious, error-prone nightmare.

Coast solves this by providing the CMMS foundation necessary for world-class failure analysis:

• Centralized data history: Every work order, PM, meter reading and photo is automatically logged against a specific asset’s profile, creating a perfect audit trail. This gives us clean, quantitative data to calculate accurate Occurrence rates for RPN and instantly create a complete event timeline.
• Mobile-first evidence capture: Coast’s work order app allows technicians to immediately capture qualitative evidence. They can attach photos and videos directly to the failure investigation report before disassembly, preserving the scene and supporting Step 1.
• SOP and corrective and preventive action (CAPA) standardization: When your corrective and preventive actions (Step 6) result in a new SOP or maintenance checklist, Coast lets you attach it directly to the asset or recurring PM. This ensures the quality control fix is executed correctly every single time, closing the reliability loop.

Beyond Repair: Making Failure Analysis Your Strategic Asset

Failure analysis is the ultimate tool for strategic maintenance management. It’s the structured, evidence-based approach that transitions us from being reactive mechanics to strategic pros. By dedicating time to following the seven failure analysis techniques, we don’t just fix a pump; we permanently upgrade our entire maintenance system. Every breakdown, once a loss, becomes an opportunity for continuous improvement.

Sign up for a free account of Coast today to start centralizing the data you need for world-class failure analysis.