Workflows
Find the true cause while the trail is still warm.
Most investigations stall in the same place: assembling evidence. What failed, what was upstream, what changed recently, and which documents prove it. An Intuigent builds that evidence file in an afternoon, cited to the sheet and the tag.
Why finding the true cause takes too long
The method is rarely the bottleneck. Whether a team runs 5 Whys, a fishbone, a fault tree, or a formal causal-factor analysis, the analysis itself takes hours. The weeks go to everything before it.
- The evidence is scattered. The as-built topology lives across P&ID sheets. The operating history lives in the historian. The maintenance record lives in the CMMS. The last relevant change lives in an MOC file. No one system holds the sequence of events.
- Topology takes an expert. "What is upstream of this exchanger" is a multi-sheet trace through off-page connectors. Done by hand, it consumes the scarcest resource the plant has: a senior engineer's day.
- The trail goes cold. Every week between event and analysis, memories fade, shifts rotate, and the operating context that explains the deviation gets harder to reconstruct.
The result is familiar: investigations that close on the proximate cause, corrective actions that treat the symptom, and the same failure returning eighteen months later.
The workflow
The evidence file, built from the graph.
Give the Intuigent the event: a tag, a date, a description. It works from the compiled graph of your plant, so every claim below arrives cited to a drawing, a trend, or a document revision.
Scope the system
Traces the failed asset's connections across sheets: upstream and downstream equipment, relief paths, instrument loops, and utilities. The multi-sheet trace that takes an engineer a day takes the graph seconds.
Reconstruct the timeline
Pulls the historian trends around the event window for the affected loops, and lays process conditions against alarms and operator actions.
Surface what changed
Searches MOC records, work orders, and drawing revisions touching the scoped system. Recent change is the most common hiding place for root cause.
Check the history
Finds prior events on the same asset and its siblings: the failure that "never happened before" usually has.
Draft candidate causes
Proposes causal chains consistent with the evidence, each with its supporting citations and its open questions. Where evidence is missing, it says what would close the gap.
Division of labor
IntuigentDoes the legwork
- Multi-sheet topology traces, cited to the P&ID
- Historian pulls and trend alignment around the event
- MOC, work-order, and revision sweeps across the scoped system
- Prior-event search across the asset class
- A draft evidence file the team can challenge
Your teamOwns the judgment
- Weighs candidate causes against operating experience
- Decides what to test, inspect, or metallurgically confirm
- Selects corrective actions and owns their closure
- Signs the investigation, with the evidence attached
“It did in an afternoon what my team had backlogged for a quarter.”
Senior process engineer, Fortune-100 refiner
Read the essay: why finding the true cause still takes too long