Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
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…]
Monitoring reliability performance requires both measurement and reporting skills. Focusing on making decisions, we can tailor our metrics to improve our reliability program today. The right measures allow your team to spot problems and solve them.
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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…]
Identifying risk is an important first step. It is not sufficient though.
Taking steps to deal with risk is an essential step. Knowing about and thinking about risk is not the same as doing something about risk.
Risk will occur. Some good, some bad. Some minor, some catastrophic. Your ability to mitigate risk allows you to proactively acknowledge and accommodate risks. Let’s talk about four different strategies to mitigate risk: avoid, accept, reduce/control, or transfer. [Read more…]
Not all of us are fortunate enough to receive great feedback. We all do receive feedback, and some receive very little actionable feedback.
If you offer proposals, give presentations, make requests, or even just ask for a favor, you will receive some form of response. It often is just an answer to the call to action, and nothing more.
At some point, you may be ‘pulled aside’ so someone can provide you feedback on your behavior, your delivery, your ability or skill. It is this type of feedback that is essential to your improvement. [Read more…]
Planning and Implementing a risk management framework is an admirable accomplishment. Now make sure it is running well and will do so into the future.
As with any process, there will be opportunities to make improvements. By monitoring and reviewing your program you will find what is working well and what is not. [Read more…]
With the advent of ISO 31000 and other ISO standards suggesting organizational risk management practices, your organization may have or soon will implement a risk management plan. Reliability of your products, systems, or assets is an element of the organization’s risk profile.
As reliability professionals, your knowledge and skills are a natural fit within any risk management plan. You may focus exclusively on the reliability performance-related risks You may find the skills and tools to identify and mitigate risks play an important role beyond just reliability performance.
Large and small organizations face risks. The lines of communication differ as do the context, culture, and management practices between any two organization. The implementation of a risk management plan has to fit your organization.
Here are few general guidelines and practical considerations when implementing your organization’s risk management plan. [Read more…]
The process to design and deliver a reliable product involves identifying risks. Taking action to understand or mitigate those risks involves much of the day to day work of reliability engineering.
Taking action to set expectations and improve decisions involves change. Change of understanding, change of specifications, change of expectations, change of designs, processes, and results.
It is the changes, big and small, that occur that achieve the desired results for the customer and organization.
You also know that not every suggestion is greeted warmly. Not every proposal is funded. Not every recommendation is accepted. [Read more…]
The uncertainty concerning the future performance of a product or system is a risk to the customer and supplying organization. A product that fails too often or in an unsafe manner may require repair, replacement, or a recall.
A product’s performance including its reliability performance reflects on the organization that designs, builds, and sells the product. A poor reliability performance is no longer a risk to that individual product, rather it is a risk to the product line and organization as well.
Reliability professionals have long been involved with identifying and mitigating risks. The increased emphasis on enterprise risk management through standards such as ISO 31000 require reliability professionals to consider the larger risk management framework and how reliability related risks fit within the larger context. [Read more…]
We facilitate. As reliability professionals, we often lead teams to identify risk. We help cross-functional teams find and implement solutions. We bring people together and ease their ability to communicate clearly with each other.
Whether a leader or participant we have a role to achieve the desired goals. Our ability to facilitate enables us to work with others to get things done. Understanding how to facilitate well permits us to add value when leading or participating on a team. [Read more…]
The new CRE body of knowledge goes into effect in January 2018. With the additions, deletions, and changes to topics, it attempts to reflect what reliability engineering does daily. Let’s closely examine the new 2018 BOK and what it means. [Read more…]
The risk management framework in ISO 31000 provides a flexible approach to create the right program for your organization. The document doesn’t provide advice or wisdom, so you have to supply that yourself.
The details of the risk management program or specific framework in your organization includes policies, procedures, analysis, and reporting, yet it also has to work within the context of your organization.
Based on the work of Greg Hutchins in ISO 31000: Enterprise Risk Management here are four considerations to supplement your wisdom as you design and implement your program. [Read more…]
Condition monitoring can help to predict failures and anticipate to them, however it doesn’t always work like this — in the best case scenario we might be able to identify early phase failures or incipient stage of damage mechanisms or failure mechanisms, but if we use it in the wrong manner it will just be a reactive tool.
More than 80% of the failure modes could be randomly patterned. Although performance, vibration, temperature or lube oil condition are being monitored, many of the failures are still not directly predicted by only these conditions. [Read more…]
As anyone with a hand in running a household knows, it’s important to keep a stockpile of key items. You certainly don’t want to find out the hard way that you’re on your last square of toilet paper. But in the case of a facility like a power plant, a missing spare part could be more than just a nuisance—it could be downright expensive. [Read more…]
There are two instances when you should implement preventative action. First, once a failure occurs and you would like to avoid similar future failures. Second, before a failure occurs, yet an undesired failure mechanism is likely to occur.
Like corrective action there is a wide range of possible preventative actions. The selection of the right actions requires considering customer expectations, business and legal factors, along with the technical and economic feasibility. [Read more…]