One of the most commonly asked questions about quality engineering is “What is the difference between quality assurance and quality control?”
What is the Difference Between Quality Assurance and Quality Control?
Articles
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Covariance of the Kaplan-Meier Estimators?
What are the covariances of Kaplan-Meier reliability estimates at different ages? I need them for the variance of actuarial demand forecasts and for confidence bands on reliability. I thought cohort reliability estimate variances and covariances in the previous article were a good idea. How good? Not as good as bootstrap and jackknife resampling alternatives!
The Kaplan-Meier reliability function estimator uses right-censored and grouped time-to-failure counts in periodic cohorts (rows in table 1). The Nelson-Aalen cumulative failure rate function estimators are theoretically independent [Aalen, Nelson], but not for some examples. The Kaplan-Meier reliability and actuarial failure rate function estimates at different ages are dependent, so their covariances matter to actuarial forecasts and confidence bands on reliability.
[Read more…]Use Of RFID In Process Safety: Track Hazardous Chemicals And Track Personnel
RFID stands for Radio-Frequency IDentification. It is a small electronic device that consist of a chip (capable of carrying 2000 bytes of data) and an antenna.
A RFID device provides a unique identifier and serves the same purpose as a bar code on a consumer product or a magnetic strip on the back of a credit card.
[Read more…]How to Reduce Maintenance Cost The Right Way
How to reduce maintenance cost the right way comes up a lot for our clients. Unfortunately, many organizations often have the goal of reducing maintenance cost. While the maintenance cost is an important long-term outcome of maintenance management, it should not be the main goal. If the reduction of maintenance cost is the main goal for maintenance, the organization is on the wrong track and will eventually fail.
[Read more…]Significance Over Success. Innovation Over Change. Anticipation Over Agility
Guest Post by Daniel Burrus (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Question for all who read this: to succeed at any business venture, you merely need to have huge resources, dedicated personnel, and a quality product or service, right? From there, it’s just collecting money and living a good life.
This presumption is more common than you realize, and could not be more wrong and misguided. In a world where exponential change and digital disruptions abound, you simply cannot rest on your laurels and merely rely on what you’ve already built. Because of the rapidly accelerating rate of change, your business is only ever as strong as its next innovation.
[Read more…]Maintenance Planning and Scheduling for World Class Reliability and Maintenance Performance
3-Day Training Course
Day 3 Maintenance Planning and Maintenance Scheduling Slides with Complete Explanations
Welcome to the final day of the Maintenance Planning and Scheduling for World Class Reliability and Maintenance Performance 3-Day Training Course. I hope that you enjoyed Days 1 and 2 and found the maintenance, reliability, work quality control and work planning concepts they contained useful.
[Read more…]Self-Discipline Part 1
In our previous chapters, we talked about how the topics of the three previous chapters work together. In our analogy, we’re sailing a sailboat to the North Pole.
This is done by using self-awareness as an understanding of where your starting point on the journey is, with a focus on radical honesty, as lying to yourself is as useless as not even starting to reflect.
[Read more…]Is Safety Training Helpful?
Workplace Safety training is a big industry…every year companies are spending millions of dollars on training their employees.
I have always doubted the efficacy of repetitive and boring training sessions whether personal or virtual (Will your Refresher Training Work?). What is more surprising is that organizations are increasing their training budget without evaluating efficacy of their training program.
[Read more…]FINESSE Facilitation: What Are Best Practices for Qualitative Assessment Analysis?
Opinion-based data is the foundation of qualitative assessments. Qualitative assessments are used in various applications, including asset management, risk management, human reliability analysis, and customer surveys. The usefulness of any qualitative assessment is a function of best practices associated with design, analysis, and administration.
The article provides best practices for improving qualitative assessment analysis. Facilitators develop and use qualitative assessments in the execution of their work. Facilitators should be aware of qualitative assessment analysis as they seek to bring a group of participants to solutions that are created, understood, and accepted by all.
[Read more…]ISO 9001 Context and in the Real World, What do we do?
Guest Post by John Mason (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
A classic question for all CEOs and floor sweepers alike. What the heck do we do and what do we want to do? In big business there is visioning, missioning, goal setting, target measuring, market analysis, focus groups, policy and much much more, more and more. In small business, we offer far more than we would like to do, but in order to make ends meet, we take on more and more until we finally burn out or are lucky enough to realise a cash flow that will enable us to niche or focus on what we do and what we want to do.
[Read more…]The Galvanic Corrosion Piping Trap!
The wrong combination of metals in electrical contact create a Galvanic Corrosion Trap that will cause many failures and costs in the future
Abstract:
The Galvanic Corrosion Trap. The wrong combination of metals can produce a corrosion cell of unequal voltage where one metal gives up its electrons and corrodes away. If the corrosion is not detected it will result in eventual failure of the equipment. Galvanic corrosion prevention is a design selection issue that one must always be aware of, as it can arise with the simplest of decisions. This article highlights a galvanic corrosion problem often seen in industry and sometimes missed by the person selecting equipment.
[Read more…]Building A Strong Reliability Culture For Your Maintenance Department
A reliability culture is a set of values, attitudes, and behaviors that promote the consistent delivery of high-quality products and services. It is a collective effort involving every team member, not just the team of reliability engineers. Proactive organizations prioritize identifying and eliminating reliability issues early in the production process. In contrast, reactive organizations only take action after failures occur, which can result in costly consequences, such as product recalls. [Read more…]
Where Did All These Reliability Life Models Come From?
Among students beginning their examination of reliability engineering, one question pops up repeatedly: Where did all these reliability life models come from? On one hand, reliability engineering is deeply entrenched in statistical models … Weibull, exponential, etc. But these models alone, do not fully explain the product life models. There is still a missing piece: the Physics of Failure (PoF).
PoF and reliability models are closely connected concepts, as they both relate to the ability of products, processes, and systems to perform their intended function consistently over time. [Read more…]
Exploding Concrete
I recently came across a very interesting incident involving foam concrete.
Foam concrete is produced by mechanical mixing of foam prepared in advance with concrete mixture, and not with the help of chemical reactions. At the incident site, two workers were removing steelwork using angle grinders while the foam concrete was settling. There was an explosion injuring the two workers.
Foam concrete produces hydrogen which is highly flammable.
To know more about foam concrete hazards, click on the link below.
1710 – Fincham’s 1851 history recorded 18th century prevention
John Fincham was master shipwright at Chatham and Portsmouth, and the superintendent of the school of naval architecture. He wrote several books about shipbuilding and construction of masts. In 1851, he wrote a history of naval architecture. His history recorded some design changes that the Royal Navy made in the 1700s to improve the reliability of its ships. These changes were important and permanent enough for Fincharm to discuss them 100 years later.
[Read more…]