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Maybe we can fall in love again

Maybe we can fall in love again

We’ll the boat saga continues.  As I shared she has turned out to be a cruel mistress.  Enticing and a thrill at times and then without warnign I get the cold shoulder.   So I am going to take a well known reliability strategy with her.  Hopefully we can just be in love again with all of our interactions being nothing but bliss.  it’s the oldest reliability trick in the book. “Less is More”  The less parts you have the less there is to break.

The more I have gone through this fuel injection system the more amazed I am it has worked this long.  The main power relays on the motor are automotive i.e. not for a very wet and humid application. Then !!!(this is infuriating) they are mounted upside down so the seams for the protective cover are on top. This is a boat motor compartment.  It has water in the bottom that get’s heated up when the motor runs. Then cools off, condensates after use.  Over and over again.  That is basically a humidity cycling chamber.

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Sample Size – Measuring a Continuous Variable

Sample Size – Measuring a Continuous Variable

Sample Size – Measuring a Continuous Variable

Introduction

When planning a test on a continuous variable, the most common question was “How many should I test”? Later, when the test results were available, the questions were “What is the confidence?” or “How precise was the result?” This article focuses on planning the measurements of a continuous variable and analyzing the test results. 

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Using the Maintenance Data You Already Have

Using the Maintenance Data You Already Have

Leverage the existing data in your CMMS to make sustainable improvements to your maintenance program

Let’s face it, your technicians have been entering data into the CMMS for years, but you haven’t been able to use it to make improvements.  Is it because the data isn’t codified or it doesn’t have the right data points?  Generally, this is how most maintenance managers will view their data, but it is incorrect.  The CMMS does have data that you can use almost immediately. [Read more…]

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Control Loops — Masters of Automatic Control

Control Loops — Masters of Automatic Control

What you will learn from this article.

  • Control loops automatically correct unwanted changes in a process.
  • A control loop consists of components to detect and adjust the process.
  • Control loop complexity reflects the accuracy and speed of control.
  • Explanation of ‘open loop’, ‘closed loop’, ‘feed back’, ‘feed forward’.

The sole purpose of using process control in, say, the making of beer, is to detect what is happening during manufacture and to decide if something needs to be changed to insure the beer meets the necessary specification. The key words are ‘to detect’, ‘to decide’, ‘to change’ and ‘to meet specification’. A control loop can do all these things automatically. [Read more…]

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Lessons from Scrum for Product Development Teams

Lessons from Scrum for Product Development Teams

In a previous article, we explored agile product development with a focus on early product validation.

There are additional key enablers from agile/scrum that can be borrowed and applied to any product development process, however.

In this article, we’ll compare and contrast the role & responsibility for scrum masters vs. project managers/core team leaders.

Let’s start with (all) the basic scrum roles:

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Stop Wasting My Time! The War on N-VAN!

Stop Wasting My Time! The War on N-VAN!

Some incredible things seem to happen as you get older. When I was in my early twenties I had very little patience for small children. They were always making noise making a mess and demanding attention. I had all kinds of patience for work related things, if we were having a meeting on what caused our chemical reaction times to drift more than a full standard deviation outside the control limits, you had 100% of my attention. [Read more…]

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Who Wins: The Machine or the Human?

Who Wins: The Machine or the Human?

There is a huge fear around the globe that:

The Machines Are Coming!

How much is this reality, fear, or over hype?

Upcoming Machine and robot wars are posed this way.

The machines are fully functional robots that can out-think and out-do all humans.  Where has this fantasy been created?  TV.  Movies.  Books.  And frankly most media make a robot a villain who kills and takes over humanity.

Now, they are seen as job killers and we all need to be afraid.

So, what’s going on?  This is:  Part myth.  Part reality. [Read more…]

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How to Sustain the Culture Change

How to Sustain the Culture Change

The key to keeping a culture change from going back

One of the reasons that culture changes fail to change and stay that way is because there is nothing put in place to sustain it.  When there is no plan to sustain the change, it will be a flavor of the week and revert back to the old ways.  This is the final installment of a series on culture change and if you haven’t already, please go to the first post and start there. [Read more…]

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Root Cause Analysis Answers Your Problems

Root Cause Analysis Answers Your Problems

What you will learn from this article.

  • An explanation of root causes analysis (RCA)
  • An overview of how it is applied at your work place.
  • See the result of a sample RCA.

Root Cause Analysis is a step by step method that leads to the discovery of a fault’s first or root cause. Every equipment failure happens for a number of reasons. There is a definite progression of actions and consequences that lead to a failure. An RCA investigation traces the cause and effect trail from the end failure back to the root cause. Much like a detective solving a crime. [Read more…]

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Top Engineers to Follow on LinkedIn

Top Engineers to Follow on LinkedIn

Although I’ve had a profile for about six years, I really only got engaged and active on LinkedIn a little over a year ago.  And since then I’ve been compiling a list of the Top Engineers to Follow on LinkedIn.

With “marketers” and “influencers” in every corner of LinkedIn, I caught myself wondering, “Where are all my engineers at?”

And I have to tell you it felt pretty lonely.

Don’t get me wrong – there are some AMAZING, diverse, non-engineers that I’ve met and learned from via LinkedIn. [Read more…]

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FMEA Q and A – addressing errant cleaning operation in Process FMEA

FMEA Q and A – addressing errant cleaning operation in Process FMEA

FMEA Q and A

What if a production worker uses a different cleaning method for an assembly operation than was outlined in the operation work instructions, and the result is customer complaints and field issues. How could this be addressed in a Process FMEA? This question is discussed and answered in this FMEA Q and A article.

“I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew.”
Thabo Mbeki

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The Central Limit Theorem

The Central Limit Theorem

Introduction

In some of my articles, I have referred to The Central Limit Theorem, a development in probability theory. It can be stated

“When independent identically distributed random variables are added, their normalized sum tends toward a normal distribution (informally a “bell curve”) even if the original variables themselves are not normally distributed.”

We can apply this principle to many practical problems to analyze the distribution of the sample mean. In this article, I provide graphical and mathematical descriptions and a practical example.

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