Articles

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

Sample Sizes – Surveys

Introduction

How many responses are needed for a survey? This question requires specifying the desired confidence and the accuracy of the survey results.

The Bernoulli Trial

A Bernoulli trial is an event that has two possible outcomes. Consider the case where the only possible outcomes are success or failure. Let the probability of a success is p and the probability of failure equals q. The probabilities of all possible events must equal 1, so q = 1-p. These relationships are expressed mathematically as

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by Adam Bahret 2 Comments

Strategy

Some leaders mistake “customer focus” to mean they have to serve all of the customers needs or respond to every request from the field. There are multiple needs I have for a vehicle. Because of this I have more than one vehicle. Many manufacturers have tried to make a car or truck that does everything. It often just ends up being a vehicle that is great at nothing. (See Pontiac Aztek)

Know your target. Make goals, make compromises. Don’t commit to high reliability without making sacrifices. Something has to move either it be schedule or new technology development. There are no worse words than a leader saying “…and it must be highly reliable” without discussing the cost of pursuing that reliability goal. Know up front if you are willing to trade reliability for growth of technology or time to market.

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by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

Red Alert: Your Culture Is Hurting Your Reliability Efforts

The Warning Signs That You Need a Culture Change

Imagine working within (or maybe you don’t need to imagine it) an organization in which everything is completely reactive. You arrive early to try and organize the work for the day, yet only to find out someone else is there doing it. [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Why Most ERM Systems Don’t Work

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

So why don’t most Enterprise Risk Management system work? Simply, they don’t “manage” risk, they just record it. Manage is a verb not a noun. It is activity not an item. Making a list might be adequate for those who want to check off regulatory compliance, but it’s does not produce a ROI. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini 3 Comments

Reliability Centered Maintenance — What is it?

What you will learn from this article.

Meanings of ‘loss of function’, ‘failure modes’ and ‘failure patterns’.
RCM provides a way to select the best maintenance strategy for new plant and equipment.
PM Optimisation, a shorter version of RCM, is used on existing plant and equipment with sufficient known failure history.
The RCM process and procedure is introduced.
How to put RCM outcomes into workplace practice.

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by Ash Norton Leave a Comment

Priority Setting for Engineers

Setting Priorities – What is your water?

Last year, I had the opportunity to hear Kat Cole, Group President of FOCUS Brands at the time, speak on leadership and the power of setting priorities. Cole shared with us her experiences on a service trip in Africa, in hopes of helping nearby villages with humanitarian efforts, and what it taught her about setting priorities. In this article, I will recount her experience and provide step-by-step guidance for how you can apply it to your work as an engineer.

Sound good? Good – let’s get to it! [Read more…]

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment

Margin Call

Stress Margin is an interesting topic because our gut reaction is “more is better.” But more isn’t better. The key is figuring out “How much and where?” this is where the attention should be paid.

Too much stress margin can end the project the same way making material too thick will turn a plane into nothing more than a crappy diner with too much security. It’s the correct margin that is needed. How do we select the correct margin?

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by Carl S. Carlson 2 Comments

Understanding FMEA Detection Risk – Part 2

Can you find this common error in detection ranking in the intermediate problem in this article? In the advanced problem, the topic of an in-service detection scale will challenge the most experienced readers.

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by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

Defining Precision Maintenance

Ask 10 people to tell you what Precision Maintenance means. While some will use a few of the same words or give a few similar examples of what they think Precision Maintenance is you are going to get 10 different answers.

While few would argue the importance of Precision Maintenance, I find it interesting that in the world that offers Certifications in Asset Management and Equipment Reliability (CRE, CRL, CMRP) you won’t find an agreed-on definition of what Precision Maintenance means. [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

Learning from A Failure

Why Failing Can Be Good and What You Can Take Away from It.

Regardless of how good a maintenance & reliability program is set up and managed, there will be failures. This is partly due to the maintenance program itself, where the focus is on the consequences of the failures, not the failures itself. This approach allows most organizations to manage large facilities will a minimum of staff and cost.

But what should happen when something does fail? Should we just carry on as usual since we avoided the consequences? Absolutely not. When a failure occurs, we need to learn from it and improve the maintenance & reliability program. Yet, many organizations address failures by implementing a PM routine. This is not the right approach. Remember only 11% of failures are age-related. Adding these PM routines to the program will cause a collapse of the program from too much work, not to mention the maintenance induced failures that result from it.

So what should happen? The failure should be analyzed and actions implemented to reduce the chance of the failure occurring again.
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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Oil — How Clean Does it Have to Be?

Clean, dry oil can extend equipment life between failure up to 8 – 10 times the normal operating life. Timken, the bearing manufacturer, reports that reducing water levels from 100 ppm (parts per million) to 25 ppm increases bearing life 2 times. British hydraulics research indicates that if solids contamination with particles larger than 5 microns (0.005 mm or 0.0002”) is reduced from the range of 5,000 – 10,000 particles per milliliter of oil to 160 – 320 particles, the machine life is increased 5 times. [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Wicked Problems

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

Wicked Problems

There are all manner of problems (being an optimist, I rather use the term “challenge”) that we face each and every day.

Most of these challenges are simple enough: what’s for dinner this eve; is there traffic on the highway that is going to impede my progress; do I have any clean underwear, and so on. Some challenges are more complex; how are we going to meet our production schedule; my primary vendor has failed and I need to bring a replacement on-line; which automobile or house should I purchase and what are the financing options, etc…

Then there are “wicked problems”. [Read more…]

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment

The “Mid-Life Crisis” Use-Case

When a product has broad usage profiles how do you create one for a test protocol. Do you select the easiest? Obviously not because there is risk of a high failure rate from poor evaluation. Do you select the hardest use-case? You could but there is the risk you spend too much time and money making the product overly robust for most of your customers.

In these cases where test time is limited and only a single use case can be tested I create a “Composite” use-case. It captures many of the different types of stresses from the full list of use-cases but keeps an accumulated stress on the design that represents at least 98% of the customers.

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by Doug Plucknette 2 Comments

Equipment Reliability Depends On Understanding Failure Modes!

One of the curses of Reliability Centered Maintenance and Root Cause Analysis is a great Facilitator makes the process look easy. So easy in fact that after watching a good facilitator lead one event we’d like to believe we could jump right up and facilitate the next one with no training or assistance. In Mentoring RCM Blitz™ facilitators during the certification process we work to perfect 2 dozen skills with the hope of turning out great facilitators. The skill we typically spend the most time working on is writing failure modes.

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by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

A 2-Step Process to Improve Plant Performance

A Simple Q&A Can Reap Improved Performance in Any Activity in Maintenance.

A failure has just occurred on a critical asset in your facility. The result was 2 hours of lost production, but it could have been worse. The last time that the equipment failure occurred it took 5 hours to repair. Why was the failure repaired in less than half the time than the previous occurrence? How can we ensure that we learn from this failure and the team’s performance to improve the plant performance?

I remember reading about a simple philosophy quite a few years ago (although I can’t remember who stated it, so I apologize that I cannot provide a reference), about a simple analysis that can be applied to any maintenance activity to improve performance. This analysis is call the 2 Up / 2 Down analysis.

The 2 Up / 2 Down analysis is quite simple and involves asking two questions.
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