Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
With twenty plus years of working with companies around the world, I’ve been witness to some incredible improvements. From a small company that was still working with paper work orders to large companies who struggled to make sense of their CMMS, the common thread for those who realized success was the discipline to implement and perform their RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance) tasks.
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There is great variation when it comes to a common understanding of the term ‘Root Cause Analysis’ or RCA.
In a previous, lengthy paper, I wrote an article entitled “The Stigma of RCA: What’s In a Name?“. It focused on common understandings (or misunderstandings) of what RCA means and then described the basic steps of any investigative occupation. I just left it up to the reader to determine if their ‘RCA’ approach had room for improvement.
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Acid Sparge And Acid Sparging. When you want to introduce acid directly into a liquid below its surface a sparge pipe is used. It is necessary to select materials that are compatible with the chemicals and the process. This article explains the issues to address when selecting the sparge pipe materials for injecting acid into a process reactor and what to consider when designing and installing the sparge pipe into such vessels or tanks.
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Tech is needed, but do not focus only on the tool – implementation is key. For my musical aspirations that means the acquisition of a tool (the instrument), making sure it is set up correctly (tuning and positioning), investment in lessons and practice, using it regularly, and eventually, someone will tell me it sounds good. That’s my goal, and incidentally, I’m not there yet.
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The first step in any forward progress needs to be identifying the reality of where you are right now. If you’re trying to get to the North Pole, it doesn’t matter what map you’re given, if you don’t know where you’re starting.
This is a difficult conversation to have with yourself, but it is the foundation of a solid framework for success and is absolutely critical for any sustainable forward motion.
There are two types of self-awareness that need to be expanded on: Internal Self-Awareness and External Self-Awareness.
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“Technical” reliability engineering is “quantitative”. This implies that the benefits of improvement measures (e.g.: design changes or alternative maintenance strategies) can be quantified in terms of system performance parameters. Refer, for example, Figure 1.
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“Preventing process accidents requires vigilance. The passing of time without a process accident is not necessarily an indication that all is well and may contribute to a dangerous and growing sense of complacency. When people lose an appreciation of how their safety systems were intended to work, safety systems and controls can deteriorate, lessons can be forgotten, and hazards and deviations from safe operating procedures can be accepted.
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Have you ever wondered what some leaders and ghosts have in common? Well, I will get to that, but let me paint you a picture. You have been told to start improving the storeroom, so you start by analyzing the performance, identify gaps and finally develop a plan to make the improvement. You share this improvement plan and business case with the senior leadership of the site. You get a resounding “Let’s do it” across the room. You leave super excited to start the improvement journey. As you start implementing the improvements, you run up against multiple barriers, such as finance not willing to write off obsolete parts or sell them back to the supplier for a discount. The storeroom staff “don’t have time” to assist with the cleanup or the data analysis. Since the storeroom doesn’t directly report to you, you talk to their manager, and the manager says their staff are too busy. You go to discuss the barriers with the project sponsor and leadership team, and they are still behind the project. Yet, they don’t go out and talk to the staff, nor do you hear about the project anywhere in the facility. So where are these leaders? They are a ghost to the project. [Read more…]
A lot of people mistakenly think that maintenance scheduling is maintenance planning. They are not the same. There is a big difference between the two functions. The job description might say Maintenance Planner and Scheduler, but in reality they are two roles. Maintenance Planning needs to be done before you can do maintenance scheduling. One person may be tasked with the maintenance planning and scheduling functions, but each has its own duties and responsibilities.
First comes maintenance planning, and then you do maintenance scheduling. A maintenance work pack must be developed and completed in full first, so that comprehensive scheduling can be done using the work pack.
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Digital transformation for huge potential business benefit uses the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) combined. Like any technology or tool, they must be used correctly or the results you want will be elusive.
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Have you ever heard that Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is just for maintenance? Join us for recorsed session done on Monday, October 4, 2021 at 9:00 am Central/3:00 pm London. Chris James will debunk this common misconception about RCM!
Read moreAccording to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics data released in December of 2020, 5,333 Americans died on the job in 2019. While 40% of these deaths were cause by transportation incidents and 15% were attributed to workplace violence, nearly 2400 on the job deaths were a direct result of one of the following causes;
· Falls, trips or slips
· Contact with objects or equipment
· Exposure to harmful substances or environment
· Fire or explosion
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I have been very involved recently with ongoing LI discussions with respected and noted experts in the Safety community, revolving around the perceptions those in Safety have of Reliability, and vice-versa.
In Safety today, there are ‘new’ approaches emerging being lead by noted Safety researchers like Sidney Dekker, Erik Hollnagel and Todd Conklin. Such ‘new’ approaches are being labeled Safety Differently, Safety II, Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), Resilience Engineering and a few more.
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