Increasing the effectiveness of FRACAS

Failure Reporting, Analysis, and Corrective Action Systems (FRACAS) are employed in many different product areas in both the commercial and military marketplace. FRACAS has been surveyed as the most important reliability task that can be performed on a program. Typically, a FRACAS system consists of a database that captures and documents field failures, depot returns, failure analysis / investigations, and corrective actions. Trends and data from a FRACAS system are used to drive reliability and performance improvements on a program. These improvements are the over arching goal of FRACAS. This paper addresses a FRACAS system in general and as employed by AAI Corporation, the contractor on the U.S. ARMY Shadow^reg tactical unmanned aircraft system. (Shadow^reg TUAS) Emphasis is placed on data collection, evaluation, and analysis on a medium volume program or product. This paper does not address the merits of the various commercial software packages, but rather shows a philosophy and strategy that can be used to create an effective FRACAS system (which will consist of more than just a failure and corrective action database) in a real world non-ideal data environment.