Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA) Root Causes Categorization and Generation of Recommended Data for RCFA Investigation

Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA) is a process used to identify and investigate the root cause of a particular failure. It has been studied and applied for over a long period of time in the industries as a problem solving tool. Numbers of multinational company such as Shell Oil Company, Petroliam Nasional Berhad (PETRONAS), BESIX and BP formulate their own tool to aid RCFA process. The tools are list of causes listing down all the possible immediate causes and possible system or latent causes. The existing list of causes from each company are usually unique and not comprehensive plus it is tailored to the need of each company. To make the list more comprehensive and generic so that it can be used by any company in oil and gas industry, there is a need to make some improvement in term of possible immediate causes and possible system causes categorization and listing. Furthermore, as a matter of fact that there are various guidelines available to guide RCFA data collection process and to set focus on type of data should be collected. But, currently there is no specific guideline that can guide the investigator straight forwardly to the data to be collected that is specifically related to a certain failure in a plant. The first objective of the study is to propose a generic comprehensive categorization of possible immediate causes and possible system or latent causes for oil and gas industry.