Failure Reporting, Analysis, and Corrective Action System(FRACAS)

A systematic investigation methodology used to identify the fundamental underlying cause(s) of a failure, incident, or undesired outcome. RCA goes beyond the immediate or proximate cause to uncover the latent organizational, procedural, or design factors that created the conditions for the event. Common RCA techniques include 5-Why analysis, fishbone (Ishikawa) diagrams, fault tree analysis, and barrier analysis.

An action taken to eliminate the root cause of a detected nonconformity, failure, or undesirable situation to prevent its recurrence. Corrective actions address why something went wrong, not just the immediate symptoms. They are distinguished from immediate actions (containment) and preventive actions (proactive measures for potential future problems).

An action taken to eliminate the potential cause of a nonconformity or failure that has not yet occurred but is anticipated based on risk assessment, trend analysis, or lessons learned from similar equipment or industry experience. Preventive actions are proactive measures designed to prevent problems before they manifest.

A documented occurrence of equipment failure, degradation, or near-miss that is recorded in a reliability database for analysis. Reliability events capture the equipment affected, the failure mode, the failure cause, the failure effect, the detection method, the operating conditions at the time of failure, and the corrective action taken. They form the raw data for reliability analysis, trending, and FRACAS.

Petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industries — collection and exchange of reliability and maintenance data for equipment. This standard defines a taxonomy for equipment classification, failure mode coding, and data fields required for reliability analysis. It provides a common language for recording failure events across organizations and installations.