Articles

Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.

Coronavirus: Assessing Risk and Planning Initiatives

Guest Post by Geary Sikich (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Coronavirus seems to be spreading quicker than previous pandemic potential viruses, i.e., H5N1, H7N1, SARS, Ebola, MERS, etc. Could this be the long awaited/anticipated threat realization, or is it becoming a media driven phenomenon? Needless to say, planners should be implementing some assessment analysis regarding the potential for impacting business operations. Here is a brief look back at one of my articles from 2006, entitled, “Pre-Pandemic Planning: Business Continuity Perspectives“, when Bird Flu (H5N1) was the hot topic:

The business community is “not adequately prepared” for a possible avian flu pandemic, says Secretary of Health & Human Services Michael Leavitt. As of July 24, 2006, there have been 231 confirmed cases in humans resulting in 133 deaths (a mortality rate of 57%). The virus has spread to 33 countries through wild migratory birds that have now infected domestic poultry (source World Organization for Animal Health). [Read more…]

by Steven Wachs 2 Comments

Motivation for Structured Experimentation

When planning and designing an experiment, it may be tempting to try and accomplish all the objectives is a single experiment. The thinking is often that experimentation is time consuming and expensive, so one experiment must be better than multiple experiments.

However, in general, it is a good idea to plan for multiple experiments which often is a much more efficient approach. We like to think of experimentation as a methodology that is best implemented in phases. We define experimental phases as: [Read more…]

by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

The Biggest Problem to Your Reliability Program Is…

The biggest problem to your Reliability Program is living in Reactive mode. In this video, I talk about how you can create a Proactive Reliability environment by doing two very important things. [Read more…]

by Larry George Leave a Comment

Firestone Tire Reliability Circa Year 2000

My wife and I were in Firestone-Walker Brewery (Buellton, California) after Solvang Danish Days. (That’s me playing in the Solvang Village band.) My wife was comparing an Adam Firestone photo on the wall with a man at a table. I was admiring a woman seated near the bar with balletic posture. The balletic woman picked up a pizza and delivered it to the man and sat with him. My wife went over and asked the man if he was Adam Firestone? He was, with his sister Polly. While my wife chatted with them, I did not engage, because I was responsible for FORD recalling the Firestone tire sizes that Firestone did NOT recall. [Read more…]

by Christopher Jackson 2 Comments

How do I set up my reliability engineering career?

One of the enduring beauties and mysteries of reliability engineering is that there is no straight forward definition of who a reliability engineer is. Proactive, successful organizations, employ reliability engineers in many different and tailored ways. Reactive, ‘barely solvent’ organizations use reliability engineers as over-qualified auditors, expected to clap system configurations through design review gates as quickly and quietly as possible.

So what does this mean for you and your reliability engineering career? Are you in a position now that you are not entirely happy with? Are you in an industry on a downward trend … meaning that sooner or later you need to move to a greener pasture? Or do you want to become a better version of yourself and feel more valued than you currently do? [Read more…]

by Robert (Bob) J. Latino 2 Comments

What Are the Root Causes of Ineffective Communication?- A Healthcare Case Study

We hear about ‘poor communication’ so often related to undesirable outcomes, that the term has become somewhat generic in nature. It has become meaningless in terms of implementing corrective action plans to prevent the risk of further miscommunication. How can we act on ‘poor communications’ without understanding what causes such miscommunication? This article will focus on applying key RCA principles to understanding what causes miscommunication. [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

Assessing Your Storeroom

The first step to improving the spare parts and storeroom process

Knowing what the best practices are in a storeroom or spare parts management process is not enough. The best practices need to implemented, and typically it can’t just be implemented right away. The level of resources, the ability of people to change all prevents the immediate implementation. In addition, not every organization will be at the same starting point or want to go to the same level of maturity. This is where an assessment comes in. [Read more…]

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

The Observer Effect Unveiled

Researchers in psychology and other social sciences have long been aware of the observer effect—a phenomenon that occurs when the subject of a study alters their behavior because they are aware of the observer’s presence. Researchers typically design their experiments to reduce or eliminate this effect to avoid skewing the results of the study. Beyond the realm of research, though, an understanding of the observer effect and its applications is valuable wherever people’s actions are being evaluated. [Read more…]

by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Show me the money!

Benjamin Franklin’s axiom, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, has been used most commonly when referring to health care. It is also highly appropriate in reliability and maintenance circles.

Of course, we complicate it in business by wanting to know what the prevention will cost and what we save by avoiding the cost of the cure. [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

COVID 19: Blame is for God and Small Children

Guest Post by Joseph Paris (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Unless you are a person that firmly believes there will be a second wave – or even that there might be a second wave – the reactions and measures taken to the COVID-19 pandemic are starting to calm down and the world is beginning to unwind the measures that have been put in place; albeit to varying degrees and velocities and with little consistency.

On thing is for certain; this event will be studied for years to come as data is gathered, scrubbed, and harmonized so that proper analysis can take place. Unfortunately, another thing which is as certain is that the analysis will be politicized – with, unfortunately, a priority of placing blame being a primary driver of the analysis and the outcomes.

But it would be wise to remember; “Blame is for God and small children” – Dustin Hoffman as Louis Dega in the movie “Papillon”. [Read more…]

by Steven Wachs Leave a Comment

Modeling and Optimizing Process Behavior using Design of Experiments

Experimentation is frequently performed using trial and error approaches which are extremely inefficient and rarely lead to optimal solutions. Furthermore, when it’s desired to understand theeffect of multiple variables on an outcome (response), “one-factor-at-a-time” trials are often performed. Not only is this approach inefficient, it inhibits the ability to understand and model how multiple variables interact to jointly affect a response. Statistically based Design of Experiments provides a methodology for optimally developing process understanding via experimentation. [Read more…]

by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

How to Maintain your Most Important Machine

Who knew that a rogue poker player would teach me how to maintain our ???? ????????? “machine.” When we get this, everything else suffers, big-time. This is similar to a “safety time out.” [Read more…]

by Doug Lehr Leave a Comment

The Pump-in Process

As stated in The Plug and Perf Process, electric line and frac pump crews coordinate the pump-in process to convey each FP-setting tool-perforating gun “assembly” along the lateral section of the well – perhaps 70 times per well. High mechanical reliability is expected, so the pump-in process must also be reliable. But to achieve this, many process risks must be mitigated. How are some of these risks mitigated? [Read more…]

by Christopher Jackson Leave a Comment

5 reasons you need to do reliability allocation (and 1 reason you don’t)

One of the more overlooked elements of leadership is explained direction. This is where leaders take the time to describe (in a tailored, personal way) to everyone how their individual efforts directly contribute to organizational success.

The leader of course first needs to have a clear idea of what success and a strategy to get there (otherwise how can they know how you or I are an important part of getting there?) People appreciate when leaders explain to them how their HR, design review, testing and quality assurance efforts directly create value. This helps motivate, measuring achievement and all sorts of other good stuff. [Read more…]

by Robert (Bob) J. Latino Leave a Comment

What is RCA? Separating the Tools from the Methodologies

If we have heard it once, we have heard it a million times – “let’s do an RCA on that failure”. The problem here is that phrase will mean something different to everyone who says it. What is an RCA? That is a question even the notable experts cannot agree on. With all of this RCA “chaos”, how do we make any progress? [Read more…]