Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
We do not want tools that waste our time. How do we know which tool can create benefit for us? Here are a few tools worth using on most projects. Each section below contains a 2-minute video to expand on the topic provided.
As companies around the globe look to improve equipment reliability, I can’t help but think of the Technicians and Craftspeople I meet after conference presentations. As they step up to introduce themselves to comment on the presentation, these attendees will often say, “I really liked your presentation, but I don’t think our management would ever support a program like this. What you are doing makes a lot of sense, but we just don’t have the people and our Operations Managers don’t understand maintenance and reliability.” [Read more…]
The Titanic had two sister ships, the Britannic and the Olympic. There was a woman called Violet Jessop, a nurse and a cruise liner stewardess that worked on all three. (That’s her, to the right->)
Have you ever been in an FMEA meeting where the team did not agree on the severity rating? Understanding and correctly applying severity risk is an important part of FMEA application. This article discusses the subject of severity risk, including examples for design and process FMEAs, and offers a tip on what to do when the team does not agree on the severity risk rating.
“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
Henry Ford
A generally accepted principle for a successful business is great people, processes & products. This can be further simplified as “maximizing customer value and minimizing cost” of the product.
Consider the following:
Do you sometimes (or often) suffer guilt or frustration due to procrastination? If so, you are not alone. It’s a common perception that procrastination is an inherent personality flaw, the result of laziness or other slothfulness. People get frustrated by procrastinators and label them as lazy, untrustworthy, and unreliable.
However, in recent decades scientists have learned a lot about how our brains work that gives insight into procrastination and why it happens. It turns out that when your advanced human brain sets out to accomplish a task, but can’t see a clear path to completion, the doubting antiquated lizard brain takes over. Your lizard brain, a leftover instinct-driven antique from the days of the caveman, decides the apparently unsolvable is overwhelming, and creates a bad attitude toward the task. It’s fight or flight, and procrastination is the flight response to the stress created by the task. [Read more…]
This article is a basic introduction to the mechanism of metal fatigue failure where parts break after a period of time in service. Explanations of accepted theories are provided and relevant design practices to reduce metal fatigue are presented and explained. [Read more…]
Guest Post by James J. Kline (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
In the Baldrige Excellence Framework the term “Intelligent Risk” appears. It is defined as: “Opportunities for which the potential gain outweighs the potential harm or loss to your organization’s future success.” This definition expresses a concern that risk might inhibit innovation. With the addition of Enterprise Risk Management to the 2017-18 Framework has a condition been created where two best business criteria, innovation and risk management, might cancel each other out? More basically, does Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) inhibit innovation related risk taking?
This is part of a short series on the common life data distributions.
The Gamma distribution is routinely used to describe systems undergoing sequences of events or shocks which lead to eventual failure. Also used to describe renewal processes. This short article focuses on 7 formulas of the Gamma Distribution.
If you want to know more about fitting a set of data to a distribution, well that is in another article.
It has the essential formulas that you may find useful when answering specific questions. Knowing a distribution’s set of parameters does provide, along with the right formulas, a quick means to answer a wide range of reliability related questions. [Read more…]
One of the best things about my job is from time to time I get to work with some younger people who have a passion for the Maintenance and Reliability business and have made the decision to pursue a career in this business. I really enjoy being a mentor, guiding the ambitious and offering advice on where to find information, articles and real, workable solutions. [Read more…]
All companies train their people. How can you get what you need? What is the most effective approach? Each section below contains a 2-minute video to expand on the topic provided.
A company sees a need for training. They set up a class agenda and bring in an instructor. The ratings were good, but no one is using the new information so no value was created. How can they achieve training success and make it stick? This video shows our approach to make it more beneficial and create company value.
There are many reasons or motivations to learn. From our boss asking us to solve a problem in an unfamiliar field of science, to simple curiosity.
When faced with an unusual failure mode, we need to learn what is causing the failure in order to solve the problem. When exploring a new material, we want to learn how it will fail in our design.
As reliability professionals, we are professional learners or should be.
Let’s take a look at a list of motivations that you may experience that prompt you to learn. When you review the past month or year, you will notice how much you learned.
When you feel one of these motivations, go with it. Learn, grow, and improve your capability as a reliability professional. Furthermore, you can foster these motivations with your team and colleagues, as well. [Read more…]
This time of year, people talk a lot about joy and family. But what about finding joy in the workplace? Most people in the Reliability profession spend at least 40 hours each week at work (probably much more). That’s almost 25% of our total time, and more than 35% of waking hours if you average 8 hrs of sleep per night. Who wants to spend a third of their life without joy?
If your workplace is getting you down or just plain blah, here are some ways to make a change. [Read more…]
A reader is having difficulty seeing the difference between a detection control and a recommended action, and sees them as interchangeable. This has repercussions for the linkage between the Design FMEA and Design Verification Plan, and is the subject of this FMEA Q and A article.
“The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.”
Thomas Berger [Read more…]
So far in this series, we have had the opportunity to discuss the role of reliability engineering in today’s maintenance environments. In this final post of the series, I had the opportunity to ask Fred Schenkelberg some questions related to this very topic. Fred, with his years of experience, was able to provide some great insights to the role of reliability engineering, and what those in the maintenance department can do to improve reliability.
Even if you don’t have a reliability engineer in your organization, you can implement a few basic reliability engineering techniques to make a sustainable difference in your operation. [Read more…]
