In maintenance management, there’s one area often overlooked yet deeply impactful — failure codes. These short alphanumeric identifiers offer much more than just labels for breakdowns; they’re insights waiting to be decoded. Whether your team handles reactive, preventive, or condition-based maintenance, failure codes can help connect the dots between repetitive issues and their underlying causes.
Without a structured way to track and analyze failures, most maintenance activities risk becoming repetitive firefighting exercises. Understanding failure codes helps break this cycle, guiding decisions with data and reducing wasted effort, time, and cost.
What Are Failure Codes?
Failure codes are predefined identifiers assigned to different types of equipment failures. These codes are often part of a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) and used during work order processing to describe the nature of the problem. They can indicate the failure mode (what went wrong), cause (why it happened), and effect (how it impacted the system).
For example, a pump might have a failure code like “SEAL-LEAK” or “MOTOR-OVERHEAT” — each pointing to a recurring issue and its mechanical or electrical origin. Using a consistent set of codes makes it easier to categorize breakdowns, spot trends, and plan repairs more effectively.
Why Must Your Maintenance Team Understand Failure Codes?
A well-informed team that uses failure codes correctly can bring clarity and structure to asset maintenance. Here’s why this knowledge is essential:
Standardized Problem Diagnosis
Failure codes eliminate guesswork. When everyone uses the same coding system, it reduces miscommunication between technicians, supervisors, and planners. It also ensures consistency in the way issues are reported and resolved across shifts, teams, or even different facilities.
Speeds Up Root Cause Analysis
Repeated failures without pattern recognition are just missed opportunities. When the team understands failure codes, they can link symptoms to root causes more efficiently. Instead of focusing only on fixing the problem, they can identify what needs to change to prevent it from recurring.
Enables Smarter Maintenance Planning
Analyzing historical failure codes helps identify which equipment is failing more frequently, what components are unreliable, and how environmental or operational factors are contributing to downtime. This allows planners to prioritize work, schedule preventive tasks, and allocate budgets more effectively.
Improves Equipment Reliability
Failure codes are the bridge between reactive maintenance and reliability engineering. They provide input for Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), which is essential for designing reliability-centered maintenance strategies. Over time, this leads to better performing assets and fewer unexpected breakdowns.
Supports Compliance and Audits
In regulated industries, keeping a detailed trail of maintenance actions and reasons is mandatory. Failure codes ensure accurate, trackable records of what failed, how often, and how it was addressed. This helps meet audit requirements and maintain service level commitments.
Drives Continuous Improvement
When failure data is collected and categorized accurately, it creates the foundation for KPIs like Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), Mean Time To Repair (MTTR), and Asset Health Index. These metrics help maintenance managers evaluate performance and implement targeted improvement actions.
Common Challenges in Using Failure Codes Effectively
While the value of failure codes is undeniable, several challenges can limit their impact if not addressed properly:
- Overly complex or lengthy code lists: Long, confusing code libraries discourage technicians from using them consistently.
- Lack of training: If technicians don’t know what the codes mean, they’re likely to choose random or incorrect ones.
- No integration with CMMS: If failure codes are not embedded within the work order flow, they become just another administrative burden.
- Low data quality: Inconsistent or missing failure code data makes analytics unreliable and misleading.
- Poor code design: Codes that are vague, generic, or too broad (e.g., “MECH-ISSUE”) dilute their usefulness.
These issues can be addressed through better system design, regular training, and data validation checks.
How Does a Modern CMMS Like TeroTAM Make Failure Codes More Effective?
When integrated into a robust CMMS like TeroTAM, failure codes are not just entries in a dropdown menu — they become actionable data points.
- Intuitive interface for selecting failure codes
TeroTAM allows technicians to log failures quickly using predefined dropdowns or barcode scanners, reducing manual entry errors and improving accuracy. - Customizable code libraries
You can define failure codes that are specific to your industry, asset types, or maintenance processes, ensuring relevance and clarity. - Analytics and reporting
TeroTAM automatically tracks trends by failure type, frequency, asset location, or maintenance team, helping you make better data-driven decisions. - Root cause tracking
Maintenance planners can use logged failure codes to perform deeper investigations and suggest corrective actions through TeroTAM’s incident and task management modules. - Cross-functional visibility
Managers, compliance officers, and reliability engineers can view failure history across all locations and teams from one unified platform.
Conclusion
Failure codes may look like simple tags, but in reality, they are powerful tools for transforming how your team manages asset reliability. When used correctly, they bring order, insight, and strategy into maintenance operations that are often reactive and chaotic. But just logging codes isn’t enough — your team needs to know what they mean and how to act on them. Equip your team with the knowledge and tools to use failure codes properly, and you’ll see clearer maintenance planning, reduced costs, and a noticeable drop in unplanned downtime. And if you want to simplify and streamline how you handle failure codes across your operation, reach out to contact@terotam.com and see how TeroTAM can help turn maintenance data into better decisions.
