Abstract:
This research aimed to study and identify the failure types occurring in each step of the gas
piping design process, and to improve work methodfor the effective operation through the
application of failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) technique.
The research methodology included the following steps. First, the expert team held a
brainstorm to identify the problems occurring in the piping design process particularly the quality of
the design. Then the FMEA technique was applied to analyze and evaluate the risk priority number
(RPN) of each failureoccurring on the basis of the three significance values of severity, probability
and detection. Accordingly, six failure types with RPN score over 100 and five with the RPN score
over 200 were found. The latter were considered critical failure and needed to be resolved. After
that, the why-why analysis was used to analyze the root cause of each critical failure and a check
sheet wasthen constructed to control each step of the operation process. Finally, the inspection
standardswere established and implemented.
After the implementation, the follow-up results showed that the failure rate in the piping
design process decreased from 14.08 % to 3.55 %. Consequently, the operation efficiency increased
from 0.74 to 1.18.