Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
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…]
This article reviews the requirements for building and maintaining vertical, bulk liquid storage tanks. Issues, which affect the care of large storage tanks as well as common problems, are reviewed.
Bulk liquid tanks can be round, horizontal cylinders, vertical, cylindrical tanks and occasionally spherical vessels. We are concerned here with vertical tanks and vessels whose internal volumes are measured in tens of cubic meters through to hundreds of cubic meters. Examples are oil refinery storage tanks and process chemical storage tanks.
Guest Post by James J. Kline (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
In 2015, innovation was added to the Baldrige Excellence Framework. While there is no doubt that innovation is important for an organization’s survival, a fundamental question is: How much does a quality improvement process, which is encouraged by the Baldrige Excellence Framework, contribute to innovation? While there is no simple answer to this question, some indication can be seen in an examination of the focus of the quality improvement process and what happens to a company, with a reputation for innovation, when a quality improvement process is implemented.
Such a company is Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3 M). And, a June 11, 2007 article in Business Week, entitled: “3M’s Innovation Crisis: How Six Sigma Almost Smothered Its Idea Culture”, argued that Six Sigma inhibited 3M’s ability to innovate. This piece discusses the 3M experience and the relationship between Six Sigma and Innovation.
It was 7:15 am. We had just finished up our morning kick-off meeting for our lab staff at the generating station, which was about to start-up following a planned outage. Mary, one of the senior lab technicians, came frantically into the lab from the plant.
“We have a problem! The circulating water pH meter is reading a 3.0!” Mary
My heart started racing. [Read more…]
This is part of a short series on the common life data distributions.
The Weibull distribution is both popular and useful. It has some nice features and flexibility that support its popularity. This short article focuses on 7 formulas of the Weibull 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…]
It used to happen once every few years and now it seems to happen twice a year or more. The customer who would like you to come in and perform an RCM analysis on a piece of equipment they are struggling with and when you begin to discuss the upfront work required to do a thorough RCM analysis they attempt to change the rules. [Read more…]
Every project begins wanting to impress the customer, complete on time and perform smoothly. However, this tends to erode away quickly and the optimization objectives are saved for the next project or next phase.
But you can achieve it now!
Toyota just issued a recall of all 1993 Toyota Camrys. Tokyo- “It’s simply time for drivers to move on.” Then added “We understand that the 1993 Camry was tremendously dependable, but, honestly, there’s just no excuse for driving a 24-year-old car at this point. You could have updated features like bluetooth and a backup camera” said Toyota spokesman Haruki Kinoshita. While Toyota is reportedly confining its recall to the 1993 Camry, it also issued a warning to owners of 1994 to 1998 models alerting them to the fact that they were really starting to push it.
I can’t take full credit for that joke. But like most satire it is inspired by a reality. I actually just walked by this car in a parking lot a few hours ago. [Read more…]
Consider the recommended action “Review results of XYZ test to confirm requirements are achieved.” Is this a good FMEA recommended action to address a high-risk issue? Is it sufficient? Challenge your FMEA knowledge by solving this problem and other problems presented in this article.
Does your team procure, setup and put into operation equipment with a single focus on reducing the initial capital expenditure?
Do you work with your equipment suppliers to fully specify the equipment’s functions, performance, and reliability? Maybe not the reliability? [Read more…]
