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Stream Engineering Solutions Limited is a Company  Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales.  Registration Number  04950317

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When major or catastrophic plant or machinery failure occurs, identification of the root cause should form a mandatory component of the follow-up investigation activities.  This will help failings in the plant, process or operating regime to be identified with confidence and eliminated from future operations.  Where significant losses are involved, it will also help to identify who is responsible for the failure and therefore on whom the onus for re-instatement or compensation should fall.

Using failure analysis as part of day to day productivity improvement initiatives (TPM, LPI, Lean Manufacture, etc) can help identify the causes of repeat failures and allow teams to focus their efforts on priority activities to eliminate "minor stops" and "breakdowns".  These two problems in combination often account for more than 70% of the lost production in a process or packaging operation.  Failure Analysis is also an intrinsic component of the so-called "Step Kaizen" (Improvement) tool within Total Productive Maintenance.

Stream ES brings an in-depth and often unique understanding of problem identification and rectification based on its extensive experience in the process, petrochemical, power and utilities industries.

In many cases failure diagnosis can be carried out directly at the Customer's premises using destructive and non-destructive techniques either proprietary or developed in-house.  Rapid evaluation of the extent and possible consequences of the failure is therefore possible, potentially allowing rapid restart of plant and keeping downtime costs to a minimum.  Conventional failure analysis can also be carried out at our well equipped laboratories on samples either collected by us or sent to us from the problem location.

Stream ES are also experienced Accident Investigators, having carried out investigations of fatal accidents and many serious incidents in most areas of the World.  We have been used as Expert Witnesses within both the UK and overseas legal systems and because we own and maintain all of our equipment our mobilisation time for incident response is generally short and we can usually be on-site very quickly.

Failure Analysis or Failure Diagnosis is the first step in identifying the correct solution to a problem to prevent it from happening again! 

It is therefore a critical component of all reliability improvement processes, since if you cannot identify accurately what the problem is (or has been), then it is unlikely that you will be able to correctly identify the optimum, or even an effective solution.