Identify Faults Or Defects & Report Within Scope Of Own Responsibility & According To Workplace Procedures

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As part of your tasks as a plant operator or Machine driver, you need to inspect your equipment and machinery to find faults, and when the faults have been found, you need to report them.

Faults can be anything which is not right with the machinery or piece of equipment, therefore knowing your machinery and equipment well is the key to efficiently and effectively finding faults.

Inspection Techniques
To inspect for faults, you could use:

• Visual Inspection – physically looking for anything odd, wrong, broken, or damaged.
• Visual Inspection of the Environment – is any fluid leaking? Machine blade not slicing correctly?
• Signals – alarms, lights, electronic indicators.
• Gauges – fuel, oil, fluid.

To identify the preferred method of inspecting the equipment and machinery, use your operator’s manuals and the site inspection procedures to indicate what should be looked for and where to look.

Diagnostic Techniques

Diagnosis is the process of identifying a problem or situation. There are many ways of diagnosing a problem within a worksite, some of which could include:
• Visual Diagnosis – you see a problem. Visual diagnosis can extend to hearing as well. For example: You hear the change in engine sounds that indicates a problem.
• Equipment Diagnosis – your alarms, signals, gauges register a problem. Common diagnostic method for machinery of any kind.
• Maintenance Diagnosis – this is the most common form of equipment diagnosis. A problem is found during servicing and maintenance activities.
• Testing Diagnosis – testing equipment finds and diagnosis the problem. Commonly used for identifying material problems.

Diagnostic techniques can be any method of identifying a problem. Each site may have a diagnostic procedure, or they may rely on the staff members to identify a problem in any manner necessary. How a problem is fixed will depend upon the type of problem that has been found.

Isolation Procedures
Isolation procedures are those procedures that isolate a defective or potentially dangerous item of equipment away from areas where it may cause further damage.

To isolate an item, you should move it to a secure location, lock the machine and remove the keys and then ‘tag out’ this means placing a do not use tag on the machine. This tag will need to stay in place until a mechanic or other authorised repairer has fixed the fault and certified the machine as being fit for service again.

Never operate a machine that has been tagged out and never remove the tags from the machine

Report All Faults
Once a fault has been found, it needs to be reported and fixed. Most sites have a workplace fault form or report form that will need to fill in with the details. The form will generally need the machinery or equipment make and model numbers, the site identification numbers, the type of fault and the person reporting the fault.

Some sites will have a verbal system of reporting where the operator speaks with a supervisor who then documents the fault, while others may require the operator to organise repairs of the fault directly (generally only applicable to external contractors to a site).

The work site induction will outline the requirements for each individual site you work on. Do not assume that the procedure for the last site is the same procedure as for the current site. Always check.