Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
I’m all about realizing the Inherent Reliability of my teeth and I use Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) to do it! Join me for a trip to my dentist’s office where Josie, my dental hygienist, details the Potential Failure Conditions she’s looking for. [Read more…]
Understanding now what perspective the executives have of an RCA initiative, how should RCA efforts be designed to report their results to the “C” level? Many would like to say “to express the results in a manner that demonstrates an increase in patient safety”. In a perfect world that would be nice, but what single metric expresses an increase in patient safety? Is there a line item on the Income Statement (IS) or Balance Sheet (BS) labeled “patient safety”? Not likely. [Read more…]
Reliability Centered Maintenance is an analytical process used in decision making about how best to manage equipment and system failures, and their consequences. Much of its output comprises maintenance tasks with assigned task frequencies. Those tasks will ultimately be managed in your Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) or Enterprise Asset Management Systems (EAM). You don’t need software to perform RCM analysis, but it is helpful. Given the link between RCM output tasks and the proactive maintenance program you will manage using your CMMS / EAM, it seems to make sense to link or integrate the two software tools. Integration should enable automatic updates of the PM program stored in your CMMS/EAM whenever the RCM analysis is updated and possibly feed failure event historical data back to your RCM analysis with a notification that perhaps the analysis should be reviewed. Alas, that’s not going to happen. [Read more…]
Let’s celebrate the birthday of a very special Maintenance and Reliability event. In July 2018, the MSG-1 document turned 50 years old. Since many of the principles found in MSG-1 are embodied in RCM, that means RCM principles are also 50 years old! Take a trip down memory lane with me and MSG-1…the first of two documents that led us to Reliability Centered Maintenance! [Read more…]
If 100 healthcare executives were polled about their definitions of “root cause analysis”, there would be 100 different answers. Here in is the problem, understanding the intent and power of Root Cause Analysis (RCA). For this reason, RCA is viewed as having either limited or phenomenal value to an organization. This article will seek to strip away the labels associated with RCA brands and focus on the processes, their results and how they are communicated (or miscommunicated) to executive management. Effective RCA efforts can fail because of their inability to demonstrate their value to the bottom-line of the organization. [Read more…]
by Alan Ross
I went to Washington recently to represent the SMRP Government Relations Smart Grid Committee, of which I am now the chair. I was there with other folks from SMRP to talk about the smart grid, and we ended up talking a lot about safety. The Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals—the fastest growing reliability organization in the world—is about to become an OSHA Alliance organization. That’s a big deal, because there are only a few organizations in the alliance and you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get in. SMRP has done that. [Read more…]
Many of you may be surprised to learn that Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) was actually developed with cost cutting in mind! Aircraft maintenance costs were huge. For example the Douglas DC-8-32 aircraft (a four engine narrow body jet liner built from 1958 to 1967 that carried 150 passengers) required upwards of 4,000,000 man hours of maintenance work for only 20,000 hours of flying time! That’s 200 maintenance hours per operational revenue earning hour. With growing demand for air travel in those years, wide bodied aircraft were being designed (B747, DC-10 and L-1011). But air travel was prohibitively expensive. That limits the size of the market and growth potential. A solution was needed. [Read more…]
“Fit or fold” is a losing strategy in poker…and when it comes to equipment maintenance. When you work in a reactive environment and only do maintenance when failure occurs, you’re living at the mercy of our equipment. Watch how RCM can help you formulate a winning maintenance strategy. [Read more…]
In a recent BMJ article entitled ‘Our current approach to root cause analysis: is it contributing to our failure to improve patient safety?‘, the authors’ state “Although RCA’s have been proposed as a mechanism for change, safety scientists believe the lack of improvement of adverse event rates in healthcare is largely because our methods of approaching change are ineffective”. [Read more…]
Improving the reliability of performed maintenance work helps in the refinement and improvement of policies that shape a cost-effective maintenance strategy that aims to address dominant causes of asset failure.
Before we continue, we have to define how reliable maintenance looks like. In the context of this article, we will define it as consistently performing adequate maintenance in the required time frame. In other words, it means performing good maintenance work while respecting due dates.
Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) was developed in the airline industry to be used for developing maintenance programs for new aircraft. There’s no doubting it – originally RCM was intended for new designs and arguably where the results of failure could be catastrophic, specifically the loss of life and where costs of maintaining had grown ridiculously high. Aircraft maintenance costs had indeed grown very high by the 1960’s and 70’s before RCM came along. In fact, one of the big drivers behind RCM was cost reduction. It worked too – in both the aerospace and nuclear power industries! Safety and other benefits were there too, but they were not primary drivers. Then, as today, cost was the problem that got the attention. [Read more…]
Watch how my refrigerator…(make that THREE refrigerators)…reminded me about Potential Failure Conditions and the Consequences of Failure. I explain why I ignored a Potential Failure Condition coming from my refrigerator and chose to act “reactively” instead of “proactively.” [Read more…]
I often ask my classes ‘If we follow our procedures to the letter, do nothing more and nothing less; would we optimize our system productivity, safety and reliability?’ The answer is NO. [Read more…]
by Alan Ross
As professionals in the field of electrical system reliability, we have a choice.
We can follow the leaders, or we can follow the losers.
It may seem harsh to say that there are “losers” out there, because that’s one of the words that nobody likes to hear. Well, I don’t mean “loser” in the same way kids do when they hold up an “L” on their foreheads on the playground (see above). I mean it in the literal sense. A loser is someone who has experienced loss. [Read more…]
Educational institutions realize that we all learn differently and combinations of learning styles will reach most of us. Some of us learn by seeing (reading), some by doing (tactile), some by hearing (aural). Most of us have a bit of each of these and rarely only one is enough. In college and university there is reading as well as assignment and lab work. We need both, so, how do we learn once we leave the academic world? [Read more…]