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Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
What if a production worker uses a different cleaning method for an assembly operation than was outlined in the operation work instructions, and the result is customer complaints and field issues. How could this be addressed in a Process FMEA? This question is discussed and answered in this FMEA Q and A article.
“I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew.”
Thabo Mbeki
In some of my articles, I have referred to The Central Limit Theorem, a development in probability theory. It can be stated
“When independent identically distributed random variables are added, their normalized sum tends toward a normal distribution (informally a “bell curve”) even if the original variables themselves are not normally distributed.”
We can apply this principle to many practical problems to analyze the distribution of the sample mean. In this article, I provide graphical and mathematical descriptions and a practical example.
The phone conversation starts with the words “Doug, I’ve got a big problem and I’m hoping you’ll be able to give me some insight as to how to resolve it.”
The call comes from a long-time client and someone I consider a friend. We not only worked together to start RCM effort at his company, we’ve hunted, golfed and attended a few sporting events together. Someone who if I’m working in his part of the country or just driving through I make a point to make a call so we can get together to and catch up on our lives. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Malcolm Peart (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
We live in a competitive environment and business generates the money that makes the world go round, or at least should do. Money is the medium of exchange for goods and services and allows society as we know it and the global economy to function.
Those who have money engage those who want money to provide them with products or services and this is done through contracts. Contracts are awarded at a price that the person who has the money (the Client) is prepared to pay and ‘the winner’ is typically the lowest compliant bid.
If compliance isn’t met then there is suffering somewhere. It can be the Client, the Bidder, the end user or all three and on Government projects it’s the taxpayer who, inevitably, pays. [Read more…]
Very often I hear New Product Development teams say “we are almost there.” Yet they can be in this condition for months or years. Using a DOE approach can accelerate to the design point. When something has hit the wall, this has been the best approach I have found to create a break through in development. [Read more…]
I just finished my talk today at the Applied Reliability and Durability Conference in Portland Oregon. A great conference in a fun city. My topic was “Reliability Test and Analysis with Intent.” I explain a technique I have developed called “Anchoring” which ensures that reliability tools maintain connectivity to program phases throughout product development. Enjoy!
-Adam
Many companies pursue a product development strategy that provides a product (or service) which meets customer needs sooner (rather than later), and then makes adjustments after the product has been fielded.
Pursuing this approach means accepting the associated risks. What if a critical to quality or critical to reliability characteristic fails to meet customer needs? A product could fail miserably by eliminating important product development work scope and accelerating time-to-market. By the time an adjustment or “pivot” can be made it may be too late, or too costly to correct.
Your culture change has a plan, it has the right people in place, and you are ready to roll it out. Your change stands a better chance of success than most change programs as you have a plan with the right people. Sometimes changes fail because the change is not embedded quickly, people lose interest and go back to their old ways. If you haven’t already, please start at the beginning of the series with the warning signs that you need a culture change. [Read more…]
What you will learn from this article.
A tornado can lift cars from the ground and hurl them hundreds of meters away. Chickens and ducks can be hurled kilometers away. The story of fish falling from the sky is explained by the power of a tornado to lift materials kilometers into the sky. The spinning vortex of air separates and segregates heavy and light objects. The heavy objects drop out sooner and the light objects are carried further. Cyclone separators and hydrocyclones work the same way. [Read more…]
The Friedman test is a non-parametric test used to test for differences between groups when the dependent variable is at least ordinal (could be continuous). The Friedman test is the non-parametric alternative to the one-way ANOVA with repeated measures (or the complete block design and a special case of the Durbin test). If the data is significantly different than normally distributed this becomes the preferred test over using an ANOVA.
The test procedure ranks each row (block) together, then considers the values of ranks by columns. The data is organized in to a matrix with B rows (blocks) and T columns (treatments) with a single operation in each cell of the matrix. [Read more…]
A coach is an external set of eyes and ears. They will break down the way you do things and assist with building it up better.
In many disciplines our learning curve rolls over to a plateau as the years pass. Finding ways to continue to improve can be difficult. The traditional, methods of education, formal training, and self directed improvement take significant time investment.
Coaching is not training. Training is pre-constructed material. Coaching is an observation and prescriptive method for improvement.
Measure twice, cut once. This is what the sign read in our Apprentice Training shop at Eastman Kodak. Anyone who has worked for a living in the trades understands the true meaning behind this phrase. The intent is to help your company save time and money by doing things right the first time.
The sign really could be posted on the wall of every shop, every office and every conference room in every manufacturing plant around the world. It applies to more than the skilled trades. The sign in fact applies to every person and every job.
Do it right the first time! [Read more…]
People are the heart of any maintenance reliability program and they have the ability to make the program succeed or fail. This is why managing the change to reliability culture is critical. We covered a few of the key pieces to change management in the previous post. But sometimes, not matter what change management technique(s) you use, the change may not be successful. [Read more…]
Transparent vulnerabilities are so obvious that they are easily overlooked; they are the ones we:
Risk and time are opposite sides of the same coin; for if there were no tomorrow, there would be no risk. Growing government intervention in the private sector therefore becomes a transparent vulnerability that we have not accounted for in our identification of vulnerabilities. Time transforms risk. The nature of risk is shaped by our time horizon. In order to achieve corporate goals and objectives time horizons are established few take into account government actions. [Read more…]
What you will learn from this article.
Why don’t you fall to the ground when you sit in a chair? Why doesn’t the roof fall in on top of you? We don’t expect these sorts of things to happen. But at times chairs fail and people fall to the ground and at times roofs fall on people. When structures are put under sufficient stress they will fail. [Read more…]