Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Manufacturing companies are struggling with the persistent and growing problem of finding employees with the skills needed to sustain and grow their businesses. This problem is commonly called the “skills gap.” Other sectors like construction are also affected by this skills gap. But at the macroeconomic level, the skills gap in manufacturing is particularly profound because of the growth in other sectors that manufacturing influences.
In all the years of facilitating RCFA, what seems like the easiest part has proven to be one of the most challenging. Documenting the problem statement. It is human nature is to immediately develop an opinion and provide a solution. When a group of people are put in a room together for an RCFA they immediately believe they are there to solve THE problem. This leads to a focus on solutions to the event as it occurred. The team gathers in the room and the facilitator asks what the problem statement is, and the replies tell it all. “Jane, the operator, hit the wrong button.” “The technician didn’t know how to install the bearing.” “Poor lubrication.” Sound familiar?
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In this article post, we discuss several important techniques to consider when conducting and analyzing an experiment. They are summarized in the table below and next we discuss each one in a bit more detail. Some of these techniques are bit more advanced (e.g. Blocking, Covariates), but they are introduced here. [Read more…]
You are an engineering manager overseeing product development. For the new offshore product developed by your team, you want to know:
We’ve all been ‘there.’ Watching the ‘mechanical’ design team lead go through 378 PowerPoint slides of suffocating technical content, pixelated iPhone pictures of bearing housings, and lists of ‘open’ items in fonts that are too small. There are ‘senior’ engineers wheeled in to ‘review’ but instead nod knowingly and ask sporadic questions about something they once designed ‘back in the day.’ And the chairperson will often ask our ‘mechanical’ design team lead if they are ‘on track.’
If you’ve ever led a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Team, you will relate to this article. Being an effective RCA analyst is tough work in the healthcare (HC) industry. It is fraught with administrative, technical and political hurdles that continually erode our will to be effective, in spite of these barriers. However, for those ‘driven’ analysts, they just rise to the challenge and find a way to go over or through these often mental barriers, because the end game is the patient’s safety and it is worth it!
As the kids go back to school, maintenance, reliability, and asset management professional resume their professional learning. This learning usually takes place at one of the numerous world-class conferences available across North America and internationally. These conferences allow professionals to observe and connect with the latest tools, technology, and techniques in our amazing profession.
Sometimes it is difficult for the maintenance, reliability, and asset management professionals to get the approval or funding to attend the conference. Some organizations look at these events as a week of vacation, where there is little to no value from attending the conference. Changing this perception is not an easy task, but can be started by having an intention for the conference.
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Organisations cannot afford to have a faulty strategy, a faulty strategy execution, or both. Getting them right is vital for their survival especially in today’s crisis and economic downturn.
Businesses survive and thrive by taking risks. They falter when risks and opportunities are not managed effectively.
For organisations to execute their chosen strategy and achieve their strategy-focused objectives, risks and opportunities resulting from the implementation of their strategy must be differentiated from the risks and opportunities posed by the strategy itself. They do so by embedding risk management into their strategy planning and execution.
When risk management is effectively embedded in strategy planning and execution, corporate leaders will know the shortcomings of their chosen strategy while identifying those strategic objectives that may be at risk during their implementation.
Reliability depends on the right maintenance being done the right way, and at the right times. At the core of making that happen is the work management process. It is a six step process that’s fairly simple, but often not followed very well. Without, workforce deployment becomes reactive to emergencies and maintenance costs are high. Work done in those reactive situations is anywhere from 1.5 to 3 times as expensive as work that is fully planned and executed on schedule. In some industries the cost of emergency work is even higher. [Read more…]
An earlier article focused on the conceptual application of appropriate sample sizes for X-bar charts. As we discussed, the purpose of control charts is to detect significant process changes when they occur. When the proper sample size is selected, X-bar charts will detect process shifts (that have practical significance) in a timely manner. [Read more…]
In order to get a broad, clear picture of where to focus, you have to view your whole plant as a large system of fully manageable processes. No matter your role, your job is to improve plant processes, helping to produce the highest quality product, at the lowest price possible, in the safest manner. In order to see this big picture, you have to be honest and expose true problems within your facility. From that perspective, you will be able to recognize the different types of losses in your plant and how to secure significant gains in productivity by controlling those losses.
[Read more…]Imagine riding your motor scooter one sunny afternoon to your auntie’s home who lives near the sea, 20 miles from your home. On your trip there, the wind is at your back and the terrain slopes downward, resulting in an average speed of 25 mph. On the way home however, you’re motoring on a slight upward slope and into the wind, resulting in an average speed of 15 mph.
As long as humans are involved in running our organizations, there will be holes (vulnerabilities) in our cheese. This is why I state that we will never have American cheese (no holes) representing our safety systems, because this would imply they would be failsafe and not impenetrable.
FMEA has an important relationship with risk management. This article provides an example of this relationship.
The suggested sequence is to first read the article “Relationship between FMEA and Risk Management” to learn about the interactions between FMEA and Risk Management at a high level. [Read more…]
At the 2019 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, I was involved in a discussion with US Department of Defense (DoD) reliability engineering teams and industry representatives. And on the agenda was a review of an emerging document called the ‘Reliability and Maintainability Engineering Management Body of Knowledge.’ Let’s call this the ‘DoD RAM BOK’ for short.
I only had access to this document’s quick reference guide, and it suggests that the DoD RAM BOK describes what reliability engineering activities need to happen from ‘concept’ through to ‘operations’ for a typical military capability being introduced into service.