Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Received a short question last week. The person writing seems to already know the answer, yet asked:
If we replace an item after a duration equal to the MTTF value, we would avoid failures, right?
Well, no, most likely not, was my response. What is your response? How would you answer this question? [Read more…]
Most equipment failures have no relationship to length of time in-service. Most failures are unpredictable. But if you detect a future failure early, you can plan and do the repair cost effectively before it becomes a breakdown.
With only about 15% to 20% of your equipment failures being age related, and the other 80% to 85% being totally time-random events, how can you improve the uptime of your plant and facility? This article explains how to detect the random failures that make-up the vast majority of maintenance expense and production downtime by using simple, low cost condition monitoring methods.Keywords: equipment condition monitoring, random equipment failure, equipment failure patterns
[Read more…]
In 2021, risk team implemented a quantitative risk-based approach to insurance renewals which resulted in reducing the cost of insurance by 60% and improving the quality of coverage across all insurance lines. This approach allowed us to save, or rather pay a fair price for insurance across the globe. Key to success was not to rely on market “best practices”, but on testing various hypotheses in the market and relying on data.
[Read more…]
If you’ve worked in reliability or maintenance for any length of time, you’ve probably sat through a meeting where someone asks “so how many spares do we need?” and the answer is basically “well, we’ve always kept two on the shelf.” Or the classic PM frequency debate — why is it every 6 months? Because it’s always been every 6 months.
That kind of thing bugged me. Not because people are lazy, but because the right tools to do it properly are usually locked behind expensive software or buried in a textbook somewhere. So I built four free, browser-based calculators that cover the core decisions reliability engineers deal with all the time. No logins, no licence fees, no fluff. [Read more…]
In the previous chapter the differences between agile Hardware and Agile Software were explored. This chapter explores the first part of a practical look at how to apply agile methodologies to your hardware development process.
First let’s examine the impact of following the “old ways” that have become normalized as part of the everyday hardware development processes:
Developing any hardware-based product requires careful planning, management, design, and testing before it can be manufactured and shipped to customers. This has resulted in the traditional “waterfall” development model, where work is done in a series of serial activities, with review and approval requirements before moving along the development path.
[Read more…]
Welcome to Storytime! In this video, I’m sharing the most valuable lesson my mentor, John Moubray, taught me. Years ago, I visited John and his wife at their home in Asheville, North Carolina. When I arrived, the first thing he asked me was, “Look around my house and tell me what’s missing.” I had already noticed that there wasn’t a single TV in sight. John believed that time is our most precious asset, far more valuable than money, and he didn’t want to waste a moment of it.
This story left a deep impression on me, and I carry it with me to this day. Time is the great equalizer—we all get 24 hours a day, and it’s up to us to decide how we use it. Thank you for choosing to spend some of yours with me today!
[Read more…]
Dear friends, I am happy to share this video to illustrate how to use JASP, the free open source statistical software to perform process capability analysis. I recommend to watch the following related videos before watching this video:
[Read more…]“Innovation has a lot to do with timing.” — Steve Jobs
When FMEAs are done is just as important as how they are done. In this article, I’ll share evaluation criteria for the FMEA Quality Objective regarding timing.
FMEAs need to be completed through Recommended Actions, Actions Taken, and risk reduced to an acceptable level by certain dates. Meeting the timing objectives of FMEAs means they were started and completed by the required dates. [Read more…]
Spot component failures before they happen using thermal imaging. Every component failure has a classic signature, a fingerprint. Observing this fingerprint overtime displays the type of impending failure and what actions to take now to prevent expensive unplanned downtime.
Have you ever seen a component look fine only to have it fail without warning?
Chances are that the heat told the story first. Thermal imaging is one of the most powerful tools in the Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) toolkit. It turns invisible heat patterns into actionable insight and when used right, thermal imaging can detect component problems before they lead to catastrophic failure days or even weeks before they happen.
In this article, we will address the following:
My father is an industrial engineer/ manager (retired). He spent his career in maintenance and operations management, and growing up, I absorbed a principle so fundamental that it shaped how I see the world: if you want something to last, you have to look after it.
It wasn’t complicated philosophy. It was watching him maintain the family car religiously—not because it was broken, but because he understood what neglect would cost later. It was seeing him make sure the wooden fence always had a healthy coating of Carbolineum and the gutters were cleared before the rainy season arrived. The lesson was simple: care for things before they demand it, and they’ll serve you well. Ignore them, and they’ll fail you at the worst possible moment.
This principle is obvious to anyone who’s grown up around machinery. Yet somehow, in the complexity of industrial operations, it gets lost. Maintenance teams fight for resources, justify their existence, and struggle to communicate their value to organisations that measure success in tonnes and throughput. Production teams, under relentless pressure to hit targets, see maintenance as a necessary interruption at best—and an obstacle at worst.
The root of this disconnect isn’t ignorance or bad intention. It’s something more fundamental: the success of maintenance is invisible. [Read more…]
Reliability Engineering has a bias that is both practical and measurable: simpler systems tend to be more reliable. This is not a philosophical preference for elegance; it is an outcome rooted in how failures occur, how they propagate through architectures, and how uncertainty accumulates when complexity grows. When we say “simple,” we do not mean “unsophisticated.” We mean fewer parts, fewer interfaces, fewer operating modes, fewer dependencies, and fewer opportunities for human and environmental variability to turn into functional failures.
[Read more…]
When faced with recurring equipment failures, identifying the root cause is only half the battle. The real challenge lies in implementing an effective solution that addresses the issue while considering various stakeholder perspectives. In this article, we’ll explore a comprehensive approach to optimizing decision-making for equipment failure solutions, involving key teams across the organization.
[Read more…]
One of the most effective analytical tools in reliability and quality engineering is Environmental Stress Screening (ESS).
ESS is a process designed to force latent defects to reveal themselves. It does this by applying controlled environmental stresses to hardware, accelerating the transition from hidden weakness to detectable failure.
The goal is not to test whether a product meets specifications. The goal is to flush out defects that already exist but have not yet developed into failures under normal conditions.
[Read more…]
We establish reliability goals and measure reliability performance.
They are not the same thing. Goals and measures, while related, are not the same nor serve the same purpose. [Read more…]
Communication…dictionarily is the imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium. It’s essential to humankind and allows us to live, work, trade and co-exist. It’s the basis of society, culture and civilizations and through communication there’s understanding and establishment of common beliefs.
Communication allows us to impart information, clarify such information and rectify misunderstandings. Of course, if miscommunication occurs and is acted upon then mistakes may well happen, and these mistakes can then cause problems. In Project Management such mistakes often result in delays, cost overruns, quality shortfalls, disputes and, possibly, project failure.
[Read more…]