A five-stage process from fault to fix
Following on from his presentation at autotechnician’s Big Weekend in November, Gareth Davies provides a recap and expands on the benefits of having a process when it comes to assessing vehicle faults in the workshop
In days of old I think we can all agree our eagerness to be doing (as technicians by very nature we are doers) has dictated the path and flow of our regime when approaching a troublesome vehicle. What I mean by that, is that a tool of choice is selected from the point at where a vehicle is brought into the workshop, in preparation for the doing part (figuring out the problem). This event for a long time may well have been totally autonomous and dictated by tool availability, it
may have been relevant to the reported symptom, or it may have been that we always ‘do diagnosis’ this way. The phrase ‘diagnosis’ by the way is not limited to warning lights on the dashboard or a rough running engine… If you stop and think about it, that’s the preconditioned autonomy happening again, isn’t it? Diagnosis is undertaken on anything that does not work correctly, does not work as it did (usually after you serviced it but 8 months later!) it could be a noise, a symptom. So, diagnosis, in effect, isn’t the culture that’s been bred of ‘plugging in’ and to be doing. Diagnosis is taking steps back to how it was done way before OBD and taking a note or two. We are all aware of the variety and proposals out there from garages for diagnosis, or as I prefer ‘Fault Assessment.’ For example, you can get diagnosis for free in some garages,
DIAGNOSTIC PROCESS
Data is defined as individual facts, statistics, or items of information (often numeric). In a more technical sense, it is a set of values of qualitative or quantitative variables about one or more objects. The statement I put forward to the audience at the Big Weekend event was ‘We are analysts more than technicians.’ My question to you is, do you agree? If you don’t, perhaps you will by the end of this article…
Gareth Davies AAE FIMI, Euro Performance
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