Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
A confined space is anywhere not normally meant for human habitation in which access maybe restricted and the conditions in the confinement may be inadequate to support life or could cause engulfment. Obvious places are tanks, vessels, silos and below ground pits. The less obvious ones are cold rooms, areas of plant sandwiched between machinery and equipment, tip truck trays and open pit mines.
Keywords: risk assessment, hazard identification, job safety analysis, safe atmosphere. [Read more…]
Why do so few product development programs make that connection between the product specification document content and the released product? It seems to be such a common thing that these two don’t connect that organizations don’t even bother to review or analyze this after release.
The mindset at that point seems to be:
You cannot test in reliability any more than you can test in quality. Often reliability testing is done though, and knowing the range of testing approaches and their associated results will help you get the most information from each test conducted.
Let’s explore the types of testing that generate information useful as you develop a reliable product. There are 4 different types of reliability testing:
Within each type there are many variations to the testing details and the specific results generated. Understanding the questions each type of testing has the capability to resolve is a good first step to implementing the right set of tests for your project. [Read more…]
As with other programs, an RCA program needs to be driven from the top and supported through all levels of the organization. This includes upper management, supervision or mid-management, and those on the front line doing the [Read more…]
Continuing the series that started with maintenance supervisor and reliability engineers, if you are new to the position of Operations Supervisor, what are some of the things you can begin working on immediately to improve reliability within the area you work? [Read more…]
Use a Balanced Scorecard to Ensure the Right Behaviours are embedded in Your Organization.
This post is the third of a miniseries on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). If you haven’t already, please go back and read the first post on what is a KPI and the second post on leading Vs Lagging KPIs. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Paul Kostek (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Here in Seattle we’ve had several interesting incidents/accidents with personal UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) or drones.
In one case a person flew their UAV into the Space Needle, no damage and no one was hurt; at a parade an operator lost control and hit and knocked out a parade attendee and the operator was cited by police; UAV stuck on power lines over a lake, result – power turned off and UAV recovered at a cost of $35K and the operator was not found; and just recently a UAV was flown into the Ferris wheel on the waterfront, no damage to the wheel though a table on a nearby deck was destroyed.
In the first two of these cases the operators were identified and contacted by Seattle Police. No one has stepped forward in the third and fourth, and since the FAA database is not in place yet, the only means to track them may be through the manufacturer. [Read more…]
Sizing liquid flow pipelines easily. Designing pipe work for liquid flow requires calculating the pressure losses along the pipe due to pipe friction. Once the losses are known the right pipe diameter can be selected. If full engineering calculations are not possible the conservative approach is to select pipe sizes that produce a velocity of less than 3 m/sec.
Keywords: pressure loss, viscosity, friction factor. [Read more…]
I was in a meeting recently with a customer team. It was on-site with 12 people ranging from mid-level engineers to upper management. Someone defended me earlier in the meeting by saying “Well, he did write a book on it!” Which was nice and kinda cool to hear someone say. But this lead to a later comeback by a crusty, principle engineer, 40 years under his belt, boat captain from “Jaws” kind of guy. “If we can buy your book then why do we need you?”
I took a moment. I knew that not responding wasn’t what I wanted to do but had to tread carefully because a poorly crafted response could easily sound arrogant. This is what I responded with… [Read more…]
Highly Accelerated Life Testing, HALT, is a method to discover the weaknesses in a design. Using a step stress approach of single and combined stresses, you can quickly expose the salient weaknesses in your design and/or assembly process.
The value of HALT is it’s quick and often finds problems not previously known. You will destroy one or more prototypes, yet the value of knowing specifically what needs improvement more than justifies the sacrifice of a few photos.
Conducting HALT may be part of your reliability plan. Keeping a few steps in mind will help make sure your HALT does provide value back to your development efforts. [Read more…]
In my prior article, an overview of vehicle telematics was provided. Telematics data includes time stamped records and fields containing count or parametric data recorded from the vehicle CAN bus. The count data is always a non-negative integer and the parametric data is stored as real numbers, generally in scientific format. This article focuses on the analysis of counting data.
Count data is used to monitor events, i.e., the number of trips, the days of operation, the calendar date, door open/close cycles, the number of engine starts/stops, or other variables. So, if a variable is selected for analysis, how can it be analyzed and a vehicle be characterized? How can fleets be analyzed? Can vehicle usage percentiles be determined?
[Read more…]
Remember that first time you were asked to step into a leadership or management role, or to manage a client relationship? The experience was probably exciting and unsettling at the same time. Something different was asked of you.
While many of us have succeeded as individual contributors or team members, succeeding as a leader or manager requires a new set of skills we have often not been given the opportunity to acquire. This applies whether we carry an official leadership responsibility or not. In a future article it would be interesting to explore the distinction between “leader” and “manager”. [Read more…]
You would think that anyone who provides a product or service would understand the value of a satisfied customer.
Satisfied customers come back for more, they spread your name around with their friends and colleagues and talk about you in that bright eyed way a teenager talks about their first love. While it would be fantastic if this feeling of mutual admiration could last a lifetime, the reality is in the service and consulting business the average relationship between a customer and a client is somewhere between 5 and 7 years. [Read more…]
This is the second part of a mini series on Key Performance Indicators. If you haven’t already please read the first post of this series on KPIs.
KPIs are often used to measure the past performance of a process, but did you know that they can be used to see into the future and predict the performance of the organization?
KPIs can be used to measure past performance, or predict future performance. This is because there is a cause and effect relationship between leading and lagging KPIs. When a process is measured, it will in turn effect another process which is also being measured, providing insight to future performance. [Read more…]
Guest Post by David Parishkoff (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
If Knowledge is Power, then understanding the cascading factors that shape our destiny can potentially offer Disruptive Knowledge and Decisive Power. Cascade Effect Thinking (CET) is a new paradigm that dynamically discovers the truth about interacting threats and opportunities in unique, analytical and gamified ways. [Read more…]