Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Over thirty years ago, Steven R. Covey, renowned author and business management guru, introduced to us The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which presented an approach to being effective in attaining personal or business goals by aligning to what he called “True North” principles based on character ethics. This book has become a best seller, a must-read, and has sold 40 million copies worldwide.
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It looks like 2023 will be the hottest year on record. Along with all the cyclones, hurricanes, floods and bushfires we have already had. Those who study and take climate change seriously unanimously agree that man-made changes to the environment are causing the climate to change so fast that mother nature will struggle to keep up.
And for the minority (yes, it is a minority as has been confirmed by many surveys and studies across the world), their arguments against climate change go something like this …
It might not be because of us …
… so it’s definitely not because of us.
One of the common questions teams have when they first explore using Predictive Maintenance is “Is the data good enough to perform the analysis?” Answer to that question is nuanced with the reliability objective and the quality of the data available.
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Let a Plant Wellness Way EAM System-of-Reliability halve your Annual Maintenance Costs
The Plant Wellness Way is business paradigm to create world-class performance and results in any operation by the correct selection and use of engineering, operating, maintenance, and reliability strategy and practices.
The six IONICS steps are used to develop lifecycle asset management, reliability improvement and maintenance management strategy and activities needed for endless operational excellence. Simply identify where you are in the above process map, come in at that point, and then continue on through the process to the point where your answers are available.
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Strategic alliances are a vital tool to driving growth by enabling access to external capabilities. They are collaborations, partnerships, or joint ventures whereby organisations, or partners, work together for a common purpose to achieve a common business benefit or purpose.
As much as strategic alliances are an important tool to drive growth and deliver needed capabilities, they are not without their challenges and risks.
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Are generic lists of failure information useful to FMEA teams? Are they a good idea or not?
There is a lot of discussion amongst FMEA practitioners on automating and standardizing FMEAs. In this article, I will discuss the pros and cons of using generic lists of failure modes, effects and causes.
The Oxford English dictionary defines “generic” as “characteristic of or relating to a class or group of things; not specific.” [Read more…]
Assets typically age over time, leading to degraded performance and loss of function. Asset life models are built in order to predict future degradation patterns. Those models are based on asset degradation variables such as time or usage. Those variables could be for example, time between failures or distance covered between failures. Many assets have more than one degradation variable. In this case, it is important to define which of the multiple variables is the dominant one and will subsequently provide the Reliability Engineer with the most precise life model.
Reliability is a probability. Specifically, the probability that a system will perform its intended function within a specified mission time and under specific process conditions. Therefore, most reliability calculations incorporate a time element as a degradation variable. Generally, when building life models, we default to using calendar time as it is more straightforward. We have had tools to easily measure elapsed calendar time for centuries now. [Read more…]
Climate change is universally accepted. And when I say ‘universally,’ I mean that the only people who think it is not a thing are fringe elements of society who are predisposed to specific interpretations of religion or commercial greed that would be harmed by any attack on fossil fuels and the energy we derive from them.
The good thing about this is that organizations who are serious about being successful and profitable can’t do so by sharing the ideology of a small minority. More and more people (including younger humans who will be the decision makers of tomorrow) are demanding more and more from the organizations they buy services and products from – especially when it comes to environmental concerns.
So to be successful, you need to take this stuff seriously.
FINESSE is a cause-and-effect approach for effective communication when there are high levels of complexity and uncertainty. Said another way, FINESSE is an approach used for big, strategic decisions that take months or years to make. FINESSE facilitates the memory of effective communication: Frame, Illustrate, Noise, Empathy, Structure, Synergy, and Ethics.
Major decisions that take months to resolve, require a significant amount of investment, and involve many people (and some calculations) have complexity and uncertainty. These are the situations where trusted advisors need FINESSE. [Read more…]
The falling cost of sensors for Industrial Equipment & the popularity of AI-based solutions means that Organizational teams are defaulting to using this strategy on all their Equipment, regardless of its criticality or other effectiveness. This is a strategic error.
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You must select OHS risk management mitigations appropriate to a job safety hazard using a formal method that delivers safe work practices.
Each task safety control will need to be developed, assessed for suitability, and recorded so it’s clear what the plan is, and how it is to be done.
In the end, there is a practically designed, completely resourced, fully scheduled, and totally sure safe work practice procedure approved for use.
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Risk…it’s everywhere whether the risks are known or unknown, foreseeable or unforeseeable but, as the saying goes, “one person’s risk is another’s opportunity”.
Within this risk-opportunity spectrum we have the risk averse, the risk seeking as well as those who purport to manage risk for their business or personal lives.
We also have those who believe that risk is something that happens to other people and those who believe that Murphy’s Law will always apply to them, always, at all times, and in every circumstance.
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Generations of products have similar field reliability functions because they are designed, processed, shipped, sold, and used in similar environments by similar customers. Replacement parts have similar reliability functions depending on replacement number: 1st, 2nd,….
Biostatisticians use David Cox’ proportional hazard (PH) survival function models to quantify effects of treatment or risk factors. Proportional hazard models could describe product’s failure modes, parts’ reliabilities in successive replacements, or products’ reliabilities in successive generations. [Read more…]
