Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
RCA Self-Assessment Tool. (linked version no longer available) The purpose of this tool is to allow individuals or groups to anonymously self-assess their current RCA system. How they wish to use the results is completely up to them!
All results are private and not retained anywhere. Therefore, if you wanted to keep your results, you would have to print them out and scan them back into your work station (or your past results are gone).
Almost all maintenance, reliability or asset management professionals have heard of reliability engineering. But what is reliability engineering? A quick google search will return the following definition “Reliability Engineering is engineering that emphasizes dependability in the lifecycle management of a product. Dependability, or reliability, describes the ability of a system or component to function under stated conditions for a specified period of time.”
[Read more…]
Computerized data gathering and information management systems are indispensable tools for business. Just remember the last power failure you experienced and you’ll understand. Technology continues to develop and become more complex. The array of available business applications is astounding and more are added daily.
Often, the end of the risk assessment feels like the end of the process and things start to ease off. Unfortunately, this is when the real work begins because, now that you have identified and prioritized your risks, you need to do something about them.
There are several options when it comes to dealing with a risk but it’s risk treatments I want to focus on here. These often go askew when mitigation measures aren’t designed carefully. This wastes resources and the risks aren’t reduced.
When analyzing a continuous variable or type of measurement using statistics, an analyst often assumes data is normally distributed. But, how can this normal assumption be verified? While there are numerical normality tests, an alternate approach is to use graphical methods. The old adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. This captures the idea that the human mind is good at discerning patterns.
Statistical Process Control (SPC) charts allow timely detection of assignable causes of process changes (e.g. shifts, trends, variation) so that root causes may be determined and corrective actions taken before product performance is adversely impacted. Proper use of SPC identifies and eliminates “special cause” sources of variation. To achieve desired process capability, sources of “common cause” variation may need to be identified as well, using tools such as Design of Experiments to develop process understanding and predictive models that explain the source of the unwanted variability. [Read more…]
Your engineering team tells you the new deep-water product is ready for field trials because it has passed an API validation test in the lab. But as the OEM engineering manager overseeing product development, how do you know that passing just the validation test is sufficient? [Read more…]
One of my more unfortunate memories of my early military career is the death of a soldier on a training exercise. I was posted to a place very close to the equator … along with the heat and humidity that came with it. The soldier who died suffered from heat stroke, brought on by dehydration. And when we looked back on what went wrong, a key issue was that the training exercise risk assessment was ‘word for word’ identical to previous risk assessments when it came to managing heat related illnesses.
This failure occurred on a turbine driven boiler feedwater pump (TDBFP) at a fossil fuel power plant. The pump in question is an outboard boiler feed pump. Plant is operating normally when unexpectedly pump shuts down and causes a forced outage.
What does the word statistics bring to mind when you hear it? Horrible high school classes that you sat through wondering why do I need this stuff? Complex math problems what were almost impossible to figure out? Or is it nonsense that is only used in political polls?
Statistics are used in every aspect of Reliability Engineering. So if you don’t have a good relationship with statistics, I highly recommend that you are starting investing time in building your knowledge in statistics. [Read more…]
Most of us wouldn’t argue that if you can measure it, you can improve it. Performance measures do indeed drive results, both good and bad. Knowing where you are now and what you want to achieve by some point in the future do help you to outline your path towards your objective. Once you know your path, you then need a way to make sure you are still on it. And once you’ve past way-points, you also need to know that what you’ve achieved so far, continues to be sustained.
In several pieces for Insights, I have discussed the decline of ISO 9001 certifications, the internal and financial problems ASQ is experiencing and the implications for the quality profession. Recently I was on the ASQ website. There are several references to Quality 4.0. This article will look at Quality 4.0 and its implications for the Quality Profession. It will also provide an update on ASQ’s financial problems and the possibility it will declare bankruptcy.
We are ready to learn how to analyze the data collected during the experiment. This is the most exciting part of DOE! We will cover the analysis in this article as well as the next several articles.
The following are the main steps to perform during the analysis:
“Team leadership is the secret that makes common people achieve uncommon results.” – Ifeanyi Onuoha
One of the key factors for successful application of FMEAs is skillful facilitation of FMEA teams. The skills needed for excellent facilitation are different from the skills needed to be a good FMEA team member. [Read more…]
Organizations are all about ‘success.’ Being ‘successful.’ Which can many different things to many different people. ‘Success’ is not simply the ‘antithesis of failure.’ One could argue that ‘mediocrity’ in many cases is accepted as the antithesis of ‘failure.’ ‘Mediocrity’ is hardly the same as ‘success.’
Organizational success means that a lot of different people need to be doing lots of very different, but very important things. And this often means things that can go unnoticed. The ‘one percenters.’ Getting things done right the first time.
