Articles

Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.

Radar Level Detectors

Radar level detectors are becoming a popular technique for tank level detection of liquids.

The radar sends a sub-millionth of a second pulse from an emitter and the return signal is detected at a receiver.

The reflection’s time lapse is measured and electronically converted to a distance from the liquid surface. Installation peculiarities need to be understood and appreciated in order to provide a reliable operating set-up.

Keyword: antenna, spurious reflection, reference plane, emission cone. [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Basics: Project Risk Management

Guest Post by Rod Farrar (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

The project management body of knowledge generally focuses on scope management, time management, and cost management. Risk management generally comes in at about 8th place out of the ten.

However, risk management is potentially the biggest part of the project management planning process. [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Some Thoughts on Exposure Reduction and Mitigation

Guest Post by Geary Sikich (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Exposure to threats, hazards, and risks leads to vulnerabilities that an organization must deal with.

Commonly these are addressed via a mitigation process. Once mitigation is accomplished, often times the organization feels that the risk, threat, hazard does not need to be revisited. However, as a result of the mitigation efforts on the part of the organization, the risks, threats, hazards reconfigure and re-emerge in a different form.

In order for mitigation to be successful, it has to be a constant and ongoing process that produces a resilience to the negative effects of risks, threats, and hazards that are realized. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

Definition of Risk Related to Reliability

Creating a reliable product that meets customer expectations is risky.

What is risk and how does one go about managing risk? The recent set of ISO standard updates elevates risk management.

A starting place is a definition. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Introduction to Ongoing Reliability Testing

This type of reliability may have different names. A quick search of a few references in my library and I didn’t find ongoing reliability testing, ORT, in any of them.

It does exist and you may have heard of it before or even use some form of ORT. Or not.

Ongoing reliability testing or ORT is the continued evaluation of your product typically using samples drawn from production. The testing evaluates the reliability performance of recent production units.

The focus is on finding anomalies or changes that may occur in the design, supply chain, or production process that significantly changes field reliability performance. [Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette 1 Comment

10 Things a Maintenance Supervisor Can Do to Improve Reliability

A few months back, I wrote a blog resulting from a conversation I had with a group of Maintenance Technicians who were attending the International Maintenance Conference (IMC) in 2011.

While the group was enjoying the conference and learning some new things, the general consensus was that they felt they would not be able to apply the tools and techniques they were learning because “management will say they support reliability, but when it comes right down to it, talk is cheap.” [Read more…]

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment

Effective DFMEAs

DFMEA’s definitely have a bad reputation as exercises that consume an enormous amount of time and unfortunately yield little value to the program.

And can be miserable to experience.

A quote from a customer “We aren’t going to do any more DFMEA’s because we feel a bit traumatized by the last round.”

I have also seen DFMEA’s be a cornerstone to a design program using its resources with surgical precision to improve the product.

I started to think about the differences between the ineffective and effective DFMEA’s. Here are some of the steps that I believe make the “good ones” GOOD. [Read more…]

by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Teamwork Produces Superior Results

Welcome to part nine of my 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance.

To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles, I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital intensive industry.

Uptime Insights Part Nine:

Teamwork Produces Superior Results

There’s an old saying that, “two heads are better than one”.

Teamwork has been proven time and again to produce superior results. It is the basis for many successful methods like RCM, PMO, RCFA, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and various quality improvement programs like Six Sigma.

The importance of your people has already been stressed part 2.

Choosing excellence goes beyond that – the use of self-organized teams brings the best out of your people, delivers enhanced productivity and superior results. [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

Become a Friendlier Person for your Reliability Culture

Dale Carnegie founded his training program in 1912.

Over 100 years later, the same course is taught to students, business people, and leaders. The course is not just about public speaking, but building relationships, influencing people to your way of thinking and finally becoming a leader.

In 1936 he wrote his famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

It is from this book, that the principles to winning friends and influencing people were born. Using his key principles as a guide, we can bring about change within our organization.

How these principles enable a Reliability Culture will be covered in this and the next two posts. [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Usability and Its Impact on Risks

Guest Post by Howard M. Wiener (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

How we design and implement systems and processes can play a large role in determining their usability.

Poor usability can contribute to avoidable risks. This post addresses the need to employ risk identification and mitigation techniques in the course of designing things in order to minimize the probability of negative outcomes. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Valuable Secrets in Every Work Order Report

The work order report is the maintainer’s opportunity to advise the engineer what problems exist with equipment out in the plant.

It can also provide an accurate record of what was found during the repair. This makes it important that work order reports are completed in detail and are reviewed by managers and engineers.

Keywords: CMMS, computerized maintenance management system, breakdown, corrective, work order, implementation. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 1 Comment

Introduction to Design for Reliability

Chapter 7 Design for Reliability of the book Practical Reliability Engineering starts with:

The reliability of a product is strongly influenced by decisions made during the design process.

The key message here is reliability occurs at the point of decision. Each time someone makes a decision, selects a component, chooses a material, assumes a use profile, the eventual product reliability takes shape.

Design for Reliability, DfR, is about making good decisions across the organization concerning reliability. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

When Management Doesn’t Listen

A Bloomberg articles details the Takata airbag recall series of events. The line that caught my attention is:

…company documents suggesting that Takata executives discounted concerns from their own employees and hid the potential danger…

“Sixty Million Car Bombs: Inside Takata’s Airbag Crisis”, Susan Berfield, et.al. Bloomberg Business Week, posted June 2^nd, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-06-02/sixty-million-car-bombs-inside-takata-s-air-bag-crisis

There are other examples where management doesn’t seem to listen when engineers raise concerns. Have we cried wolf too often? Has management gotten used to taken risks as a good business practice?

At times reliability risks are real and need to be clearly communicated. Let’s talk about how you can effectively get the message across. [Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

RCM Leaders and Followers

Funny how times change.

When I first began speaking at conferences in 1999 some of the statements I made regarding how to most effectively manage a Reliability Centered Maintenance program were publically criticized by practitioners of other methodologies.

Sixteen years later it seems that those who were at first critical of RCM Blitz® seem to have adopted nearly every change I made to make RCM easier to Manage, Facilitate and provide a return on investment (ROI) for the time it takes to train people, perform the analysis, implement the results, and perform the RCM tasks. [Read more…]

by James Reyes-Picknell 2 Comments

Managing Failures Before They Occur

Welcome to part eight of my 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance.

Uptime Insights Part Eight:

Asset Reliability

Being proactive with your assets is all about managing failures before they occur.

You can reduce or eliminate the consequences of failure by forecasting what is likely to happen and deciding in advance about what to do about it. The advantage to doing this is that major business impact due to equipment breakdown can be avoided.

High performing companies manage proactively – they foresee and avoid problems.

It’s good for business! [Read more…]