Even when you set out to improve the reliability of your plant you’ll continue to experience failures in your plant. We know from experience that some 80% of failures that occur in a plant have occurred before. That’s where defect elimination comes in.
What happens in most organisations that deal with repeat failures? We plan for these failures. We write job plans. We hold extra spares. And when the failure happens we can fix it fast. We get better and better at fixing failures.
That’s great, right?
Maybe. Chances are that you could be a lot greater if instead of fixing that failure over and over again you actually fixed the source of the failure. If you fixed the defect that is causing that failure.

You will get nowhere on the Road to Reliability™
without Defect Elimination

Research done by Winston Ledet whilst working for Dupont in the 1990s has shown that when you implement Planning & Scheduling, Preventive Maintenance and Defect Elimination you can reduce your downtime by 90%.
About 30% of that reduction in downtime is because of Planning & Scheduling and Preventive Maintenance. And about 60% is the result of Defect Elimination.
Simply put, you’ll never become a Reliable Plant if you don’t get rid of those defects that keep generating failures.
You will always be fighting fires and working in a reactive environment unless you get rid of those defects.
Implementing Planning & Scheduling on its own is not enough. Implementing Preventive Maintenance on its own is not enough. Even implementing both is not enough.
You need to start applying Root Cause Analysis and establish a Defect Elimination culture to make big strides in improving your reliability.
Online training courses that teach your team
how to implement Defect Elimination & Root Cause Analysis
Defect Elimination &
Root Cause Analysis

Learn the powerful principles of Defect Elimination and Root Cause Analysis and how both are essential on your journey to higher reliability.
We offer a suite of courses on Defect Elimination & Root Cause Analysis tailored for those leading an implementation (DE100), practitioners like reliability engineers or supervisors (DE200), managers (DE300), and frontline staff like Operators and Technicians (DE400).
Explore coursesDefect Elimination improves
plant reliability more than anything else
Root Cause Analysis & Defect Elimination: Why you can’t do without
With the Road to Reliability™ Framework you can reduce your downtime by 90%. And although you need all 4 Essential Elements to succeed the majority of your downtime reduction will come through Defect Elimination.
In this article, I will explain in detail why you need to apply Root Cause Analysis and establish a Defect Elimination culture to succeed in your journey to a Reliable Plant.
Tell me why

What effective Defect Elimination looks like
With the Road to Reliability™ Framework you can reduce your downtime by 90%. And although you need all 4 Essential Elements to succeed, the majority of your downtime reduction will come through Defect Elimination.
In this article, I will explain in detail why you need to apply Root Cause Analysis and establish a Defect Elimination culture to succeed in your journey to a Reliable Plant.
And it works.
Show me howHow to implement Defect Elimination
Knowing that Root Cause Analysis and Defect Elimination are critical to your reliability success is one thing. Implementing them successfully and sustaining the change in the long run is a very different story.
In this article, I will give you a detailed step-by-step implementation guide that addresses both RC techniques as well as building a Defect Elimination culture.
Show me how