Most plants fix the same equipment repeatedly. The work order closes, the asset runs, and six weeks later — the same failure. This is not a maintenance execution problem. It is a defect problem. Optimal's Defect Elimination programme — embedded within ARaaS® — identifies and permanently removes the chronic failure patterns draining your production and maintenance budget.
Most Plant and Operations Directors can name their worst assets without looking at a report. The pump on Train 3. The fan on the dryer line. The compressor that goes down every eight weeks. They are fixed, they run, they fail again.
The direct cost of each repair is visible — labour, parts, production loss. What is rarely quantified is the accumulated cost of the pattern: the planning effort tied up on known bad actors, the spare parts held against failures that should not happen, the production scheduling built around an asset that cannot be trusted.
A single chronic failure asset, generating six unplanned interventions per year with an average four-hour production impact, can represent hundreds of thousands in real cost — before a single bearing or seal is invoiced. Defect Elimination is not a maintenance programme. It is a financial intervention.
Read our Defect Elimination deep-dive"Most organisations have far more defects than can be ascribed to normal wear and tear. There are defects that are not inevitable — and if we prevent them from ever entering the plant, we can avoid all the work required to detect and remove them."
Defect Elimination 101 — Reliability.com · adapted by OptimalA defect is anything that erodes value, reduces production, compromises safety or environmental performance, or creates waste. Not just broken components — operating procedures that introduce wear, installation practices that cause misalignment, procurement decisions that introduce sub-specification materials.
Root Cause Analysis is reactive — it investigates a failure after it has occurred and recommends a corrective action. Defect Elimination is proactive and systemic. It identifies the conditions that allow defects to enter and persist in the plant, eliminates those conditions at source, and confirms through ongoing measurement that they do not return.
The distinction matters to a Plant Director because RCA generates reports. Defect Elimination generates sustained changes in MTBF, maintenance cost and production availability — measurable outcomes that appear on the P&L.
Understanding the sources of defects is what separates elimination from repair. Optimal's programme traces chronic failures back to their origin — the decisions, practices and conditions that allowed the defect to enter the plant — and closes those pathways permanently.
The most common chronic failure modes are not random events — they are identifiable fault signatures that remain latent until a threshold is crossed. Optimal's 35,000+ item maintainable library provides the failure mode taxonomy to find them systematically.
Optimal's Defect Elimination programme follows a structured three-phase lifecycle — from identifying the bad actors costing the most, through systematic execution and data-driven intervention, to continuous improvement and ROI confirmation. Every phase produces a defined output. Progress is measured against agreed KPIs throughout.
Defect Elimination does not work with generic maintenance thinking. It requires specific analytical tools, field diagnostics and a failure mode library large enough to recognise patterns that are invisible to an organisation looking at its own data. Optimal's ARaaS® ToolBox provides all of these — built and validated over a decade of project delivery.
An LNG liquefaction operator engaged Optimal to conduct the initial review stages of a Residual Life Assessment (RLA) — transitioning the plant from an early-life reliability phase towards a more mature operational model, with ageing equipment and associated risk profiles clearly documented. The existing CMMS contained inconsistencies and gaps that were masking the true condition of the asset base. Optimal applied the ARaaS® ToolBox to conduct desktop asset verification, historic maintenance review to establish ageing and degradation mechanisms, condition scoring, and RLA toolkit population for further study and life extension planning.
A major North Sea operator engaged Optimal following unacceptable levels of unplanned shutdowns on two offshore platforms with dual-fuel aeroderivative turbines. Despite redundancy in the generation system, load shedding events during high-demand periods were creating production interruptions. Optimal undertook a Failure Mode driven maintenance and spares strategy review across five turbines with differing ages and manufacturing origins, identifying systemic defects invisible to the operator's existing maintenance regime. The programme included RCM analysis, spares review, vulnerability assessment and a complex cross-organisational RCM project conducted in collaboration with client engineers and external stakeholders.
Defect Elimination is not a standalone engagement at Optimal. It is the execution phase of the ARaaS® cycle — the point at which the failure mode analysis, condition monitoring and reliability strategy converge into tangible, measurable plant improvement.
This matters because the most common reason DE programmes fail is that they are conducted in isolation from the maintenance strategy and monitoring infrastructure that sustains the improvement. A defect eliminated without changing the conditions that allowed it to exist will return. ARaaS® closes that loop.
Understand the full ARaaS® frameworkEvery Defect Elimination programme begins with a conversation about your chronic failure assets — the ones your maintenance team already knows. We will tell you honestly whether a structured DE programme is warranted, what it would look like within your ARaaS® context, and what outcomes are realistic. No obligation. No proposal before the conversation.
The Global Asset Reliability & Performance Index is Optimal's free industry benchmarking survey — giving you a structured view of where your organisation stands against global peers before committing to any programme.