Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Implementing a Maintenance Planning & Scheduling process can be trying, difficult and downright frustrating. How would you like to dramatically reduce the stress involved and see results quicker? By utilizing these 5 tips, you will be able to build a robust, highly efficient and effective process with reduced effort. [Read more…]
What readers will learn in this article.
Guest Post by Ed Perkins (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Why are there “bad” decisions? No one starts out to deliberately make a bad decision. If you look into available thought papers and reports, you can find some evidence that can provide some understanding of how bad decisions are made.
COSO in 2012, commissioned a report on “Enhancing Board Oversight”[1] focusing on challenges and biases in making professional judgments.
More recently, several HBS faculty authored a study an “attribution error”[2], where decisions are biased by unjustified attributions of goodness to applicants based on “luck” rather than ability. [Read more…]
Often when we request an analysis from an engineer we run with the results and don’t ask a lot of questions about the analysis itself. Having done a lot of analysis I am familiar with all the assumptions and estimations that go into making a calculation work. But that means that the results of the analysis are only relevant to those assumptions and estimations. The analyst may have to make the following “calls” without additional input or only a small fact-finding mission. [Read more…]
Have you ever worked on a project with no deadlines, unlimited resources, and boundless scope? Probably not.
You may have worked under the guidelines of a quality triangle, also known as a project management triangle, iron triangle, or project triangle.
Why is that? Why the limits to our ability to create a product or improve a system?
First, the world we work and live within has limits. We have only so much time for work, only the available resources, and limited knowledge. We do our best with what we have to work with at the time.
Second, as I once was told while working on an accelerated test design, ‘if there isn’t a deadline, you’ll happily tinker with the plan and get the testing done.’ My boss was right of course.
The set of constraints shape our projects and products. By understanding the set of constraints, specifically how they frame decisions, then we can complete complex projects. [Read more…]
Convince, don’t confuse! Justify, don’t exaggerate!
Project managers want to deliver their product on time and on schedule. Design engineers want to believe that they have got it right. But your analysis, test results and field data suggest that there might be a problem. What do you do?
The key words here are “suggest” and “might be”. How should you present your evidence and analysis such that it doesn’t exaggerate with certainty, or confuse with statistics? How should you ensure that your conclusions lead to positive action? [Read more…]
Product design, development, and reliability engineers need to verify that their product meets specifications, which include dimensional requirements, functional definitions, and life testing. How are the requirements validated?
Telematics data is collected to show how a vehicle has been operated. Fleets and retail data are stored on servers for engineering analysis. This data can be used to set new requirements or validate older requirements.
In my last article, RCA Templates Use or not?, I discussed templates and suggested that while beneficial for many things, they may not provide as much value for those doing RCA’s. This is because for any specific effect, the variability in the cause tree is significant and difficult to predict. This doesn’t mean that there are no options to utilize templates to help speed up the process, but perhaps not in the way that people might be used to. [Read more…]
In a recent Seth Godin blog, Counting beans he talks about the eventual costs of little compromises. The immediate benefit may be celebration worthy, yet
But overlooked are the unknown costs over time, the erosion in brand, the loss in quality, the subtraction from something that took years to add up.
This certainly applies to reliability as well. Deferring maintenance just one more month, addressing one more software bug can be done after shipping, and similar small shifts erode reliability of your system. [Read more…]
One of the most challenging aspects of being a consultant is addressing the musings of those who have accepted defeat.
With a smile of course; and friendly reassurance that you have in fact worked with companies who were worse off and with some training, confidence and a sound business plan they were able to turn things around to a point where people actually enjoyed coming to work. [Read more…]
Shutdown, Turnaround, Outage are all the same thing. An extended planned downtime event, in which a tremendous amount of resources are utilized to ensure the site will be able to achieve its business goals. Whether the shutdown involves overhauls, CAPEX or a combination, the successful completion of the shutdown depends heavily on the planning and execution of it.
Shutdowns are resource intensive and often under compressed timelines. This unique situation requires a different approach to planning, scheduling and executing work, than the typically Maintenance Planning & Scheduling process. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Greg Hutchins (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Did we get it all wrong? Wow! This could break our business model. Let me explain:
We developed Certified Enterprise Risk Manager® and all of our risk IP based on a simple fact. We live in VUCA time (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity). We based our business business model on providing:
So, what’s the problem? [Read more…]
Many of the chemicals we deal with each day are dangerous and need to be handled correctly and safely. Safe use of dangerous goods includes recognising when situations can arise where the consequence of a failure or error will result in danger to life, property or the environment. One of the methods used to minimise risk when dealing with dangerous goods is by separation and segregation.
Keywords: Hazard, storage facility, control, emergency plan, MSDS, material safety data [Read more…]
Customers of your product would like the particular one they have to work. To work over time.
If a product meets the customer’s expectation by working as long or longer than they expected it to do so, then they may consider your product reliable.
We use reliability goals to discuss the customer’s reliability expectations. It is the establishment of requirements that converts the customer expectations to development and production obligations. [Read more…]
My career path in systems engineering. I don’t mean my professional engineering career exactly. My systems engineering portfolio I would say started at about the age of nine if I had to pick a point in time. At nine I made a small hydro-electric power plant in the stream behind my house so I could have light in the woods. I could have taken a purely electrical approach, battery, wires, bulb, or a chemistry approach, matches, wood, oxygen, or a mechanical approach (actually how do you make light mechanically? Sparks??) anyway… But I took a systems approach. [Read more…]
