Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
When a control valve or manual valve is shut fast in a full pipeline of moving liquid, the liquid comes to a sudden stop. If the pipe suddenly starts banging and thrashing about you can be sure a water hammer was created. [Read more…]
Leadership is a difficult term to clearly define. A team leader may have poor or wonderful leadership skills. A product may lead in a market with a broad feature offering, yet not hold a recognized leadership position.
As a reliability engineer, you will find many opportunities to lead. Your ability to provide vision, direction, guidance, and support for a team enables you to affect change and accomplish goals. [Read more…]
First things first, let’s get something straight, I am not an internet marketing genius. I do however talk with dozens of folks like myself who have active websites, write regular blog posts and enjoy interacting with family, friends and even customers via social media.
As a result like everyone else I have my list of pet peeves, the things that on their own may not send me over the top but put a few of them together and you will find me talking to the computer screen or my cell phone in a language not intended for young audiences. [Read more…]
The bane of our existence is one thing, generating enough data to demonstrate statistical confidence. Every reliability engineer, every project manager, every Director and VP all have the same moment of panic in a new product development program. In synchronicity they put their head in their hand. It’s when the required number of test units and calendar time to demonstrate a required confidence in the reliability goal is calculated. It’s usually about ten times more units than can be acquired and about two times longer than the entire product development program timeline.
I have been working with clients recently who are keen users of FMEA. Getting engineers to contribute potential failures and their causes is not a problem with these clients, but ensuring that actions are correctly identified and followed up is not so easy. So, what goes wrong? What differentiates a good FMEA from a great FMEA? [Read more…]
Is it a good idea to do one generic FMEA for wiring harnesses, and use it as a reference for other FMEAs for similar applications? What about interfaces? These questions are discussed and answered in this FMEA Q and A article.
“We live in the world our questions create.”
David Cooperrider
Another great method of becoming overwhelmed with work as a Maintenance Professional is to fill our day full of meetings. Worse, those meetings usually do not provide any value to you, nor do you have any inputs into the meeting.
We all know the meetings we dread going to, not because they are long, or the people in them, but because we know that it is a complete waste of time and is preventing you from accomplishing important maintenance & reliability tasks.
Next to emails, meetings are one of the most common complaints as a time waster that prevents the department and business from moving forward. Some meetings are required, and some need you the Maintenance Professional, but not all.
Throughout the rest of the article, we will cover how the Maintenance Professional can identify, evaluate and end those ineffective meetings. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Geary Sikich (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
We live in a world of consequences. Everything that we experience is a consequence of some action, decision, reaction and/or choice. For organizations, the consequences of a choice, action, decision and/or reaction can cascade throughout the organization and extend to its “Value Chain” rippling through all the known touchpoints and the as yet, unidentified touchpoints.
Organizations need to understand their strategic, operational and tactical capabilities and capacity to recognize, mitigate and/or capitalize on cascade effects. As a result of the diverse nature of global business operations, geopolitical circumstances, culture, etc., there currently is a standardization gap with regard to how organizations should react to cascade effects. This is partly due to opacity, nonlinearity and insufficient competitive/business intelligence that organizations can draw from. This is not to say that the information does not exist. Rather that it does not exist in a form that is readily recognizable to organizations in most cases. [Read more…]
This true story could have been a lot worse. A NB100 (4”) flanged plug valve was removed from a 98% sulphuric acid tank nozzle and returned to the supplier. When the valve was opened for inspection at the supplier’s workshop acid was sprayed over the repairman’s legs.
If 98% sulphuric acid lands on skin it immediately boils out the moisture in the skin and burns it. A review of the incident was conducted to learn from the accident and to put corrective measures into place. [Read more…]
On occasion, we want to estimate the reliability of an item at a specific time.
Maybe we are considering extending the warranty period, for example, and want to know the probability of no failures over one year instead of over the current 3 months.
Or, let’s say you talked to a bearing vendor and have the Weibull parameters and wish to know the reliability value over 2 years.
Whatever specific situation, you have the life distributions parameters. You just need to calculate reliability at a specific time. We can do that and let’s try it with three distributions using their respective reliability functions: exponential, Weibull, and lognormal. [Read more…]
Telematics data presents the opportunity to characterize the vehicle lifetime usage. This information is used to validate development and testing targets. Because there can be bad or missing data, it needs to be reviewed prior to analysis to have confidence in the analysis. [Read more…]
I’m participating on a conference call with a number of companies who made the commitment to begin a reliability journey. Each have drafted a 3 year vision that includes quarterly goals or milestones they worked to achieve and I’m impressed that the first company to present appears to be on goal or even ahead of their target.
“We had a goal this quarter to certify 60 people across our three sites and in our first month 28 people have taken the exam and if all goes as expected we should have at least 20 of those pass the exam. Next month we have over 30 people signed up so I think we are well on our way.” [Read more…]
I was teaching a class on Reliability 101 a few years ago and it turned out to be one of those great classes where debate and discussion would just pop up all over the place. I frequently start my classes with “If I end up being the only one speaking today I am going to take that as an indication of complete failure in having engaged you in this material.” So I was loving that this group were starting to debate each other on the material we were covering. I wasn’t even in some of the conversations. This rich environment is where I just spurted out one of my more memorable reliability quotes. [Read more…]
The DC-10 case study continues by asking for causes to the door latch-pin failure. The advanced problem poses a realistic and especially challenging circumstance that FMEA teams can experience.
“Judge a man by his questions, not his answers.” Voltaire
A common complaint I hear and experience is as a maintenance professional, our inbox has exploded and grown rapidly with all the daily activities in a plant. All the emails are perceived to be important, but in reality, they are mostly urgent, or not important and not urgent.
Take a moment and think about how much time you spend reviewing and answer emails. Even those emails that do not need a response, need time to review and move or delete. I am guessing you spend at least an hour a day dealing with email. Now think about what you can do with that hour… you could move the department forward and achieve the department and business goals.
Thankfully there are 6 steps you can implement to reduce the number of emails you receive and reduce the amount of time it takes to manage the remaining email. [Read more…]
