Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Recently there was a power outage, that caused approximately 2,000 homes to lose power during a very cold day. The paper headline read, “All-day outage caused by worn wiring”.
This seems like a reasonable comment and probably like many other newspaper headlines also seems to go a long way to explain what caused the 2,000 homes and business to lose power for 5 ½ hours, and the 300 that lost power for a total of 11 ½ hours. [Read more…]
Today article is one of those off-topic things I just felt compelled to write about. It also has a bit of the sarcasm us New Yorkers are famous for, but I’m betting the other business travelers will be able to relate!
With my work comes travel and in the last 15 years, I have seen a fair amount of the world.
Let me rephrase that, I have seen a fair amount of the world’s airports, hotels, manufacturing facilities, and restaurants.
Along the way, I have met some very good people, learned a whole lot about how different products are made or produced and discovered for myself that no matter where you live, where you grew up, or what you do, everyone still wants the simple things in life: a secure job, a roof over their head, and to be afforded the time to both provide for and enjoy raising a family. [Read more…]
Finding solutions is reliability engineering too.
Have you noticed that finding solutions often requires just the right question, the proper framing of the issue, the query that reveals the problem and solution?
One of the best ways to lead a team and provide a focus on reliability performance is to ask the right questions.
Understanding objectives, risks, and failures is what we primarily do as reliability professionals. We work with teams to achieve or improve reliability performance.
We ask questions. [Read more…]
Conventional consulting approaches begin with assessments to determine your current state of affairs, judge what’s good and bad about it, give it a score, provide a long list of recommendations and then build an improvement strategy based on the outcome.
Strategy development is normally carried out by a select leadership team and then the change is rolled out to lower levels in the organization. This approach has served well for a long time and it is at the outset of almost any major consulting engagement.
It is useful when comparing sites among each other, but is there some sort of award for being best? Usually not. [Read more…]
Building on the Dale Carnegie® Principles from the famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, we can progress to the final set of principles.
Using his key principles as a guide, we can bring about change within our organization.
In the first post, we covered how to build authentic and meaningful relationships. In the second post, we covered how to win people to your way of thinking. In this last post, we will cover what it means to be a leader.
If you haven’t read the previous posts, I strongly suggest that you do, as they build on each other. [Read more…]
Written with assistance from Ben Karel of Fusion Engineering Plastics
Pty Ltd. Unit 1, 7 Dobra Rd, Yangebup WA ph (08) 9494 1004
Welding can join thermoplastic parts together. It can be by melting the surfaces and pressing them together or by extrusion welding with a filler rod.
Several methods of welding are available. Proper manual techniques are critical to success as is the pressure testing of pressure parts.
Keywords: electro-fusion, butt welding, electro-socket welding, hot air gun, melt temperature. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Ed Perkins (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
In the 1960’s Ralph Nader became famous by writing an expose’ of the Corvair, a rear-engined Chevy built by General Motors.
He called it “Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile “[1][2]. He accused car makers of ignoring safety, resisting providing seat belts and other design issues that contributed to injuries in accidents.
In 1966 the U.S. Congress passed the Highway Safety Act (aka National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act), which created mandatory federal safety standards for motor vehicles and established what is now the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. [Read more…]
The world of risk management has a unique set of risk terminology.
Your ability to incorporate reliability concerns into risk discussions hinges on understanding the terms in use.
Let’s explore a few terms and how they relate to reliability engineering. [Read more…]
We all probably know Fred’s fight against the use of “MTBF” as a default measure of reliability.
And I concur. “MTBF” offers the least insight to product reliability. It offers little to the user in terms of realizing the benefits of reliability.
However, we all would like to see products that deliver more appealing benefits; and reliability is a key factor. But reliability is only part of the equation.
Technical performance is important.
So is price. So is appearance. So is delivery. So is the customer: different customers may see the world differently. And so may your competitors.
So, we can’t all adopt the same measurement for reliability. [Read more…]
Occasionally, I like to step back and reflect on reliability in basic terms.
In that spirit, the basic premise of reliability is usually stated as “The probability that an item will perform a required function, without failure, under stated conditions, for a stated period of time.”
To use the reliability equation, the definition of failure must be defined, so you can tell if your equipment has indeed failed. This way you can include it in the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) calculation.
After you have defined a failure and recorded them appropriately, you can plug the numbers into the reliability equation, R = e ^-(λ*t) where λ is the failure rate which is defined as λ= 1/MTBF and come up with an objective value for the reliability. [Read more…]
Reliability goals or objectives are just a starting point.
You goals represent your target at one point in time.
At best they represent what your customers expect for reliability performance at one point in time.
When goals are set well, they anticipate what your customer expects when they receive your product. In a perfect world, you customer will find the reliability performance just a bit better than expected.
It’s not a perfect world. [Read more…]
“Dave is the guy we call when we need to get the plant up and running again; there really isn’t anything he can’t fix.”
Dave sits back in his chair, he looks down and while he is smiling I can see he is slightly embarrassed by the praise his manager is heaping on him.
It’s clear to me that he is not comfortable sitting in this conference room with a group of people that includes his manager, supervisor, and two engineers who are here to kick off their first RCM analysis. I have just begun asking the group to introduce themselves; Dave followed his manager and the two engineers in the room who each rattled off where they attended college, what their degrees they earned, the areas of the plant they are responsible for, their hobbies outside of work and some banter regarding the upcoming college football season.
Then it was Dave’s turn. [Read more…]
Welcome to the final blog in my 10-part series 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.
Whenever you are following a set of steps to achieve some goal you are following a process.
Your people do their jobs through day to day implementation of those processes in order to deliver results. If the processes are ill-conceived or inefficient things move slowly and results are more expensive to obtain than they need to be.
Well designed, efficient processes that integrate with other related business processes keep things running smoothly, costs down and help to keep people motivated. [Read more…]
Building on the Dale Carnegie® Principles from the famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, we can progress to the next set of principles.
Using his key principles as a guide, we can bring about change within our organization. In the previous post, we covered how to build authentic and meaningful relationships.
If you have not read that post, yet, please go back and do so before reading on.
I was part way through my Dale Carnegie® course when I was challenged to make a change at work by using one or two of the principles below.
We were struggling with being able to complete our weekly PMs because we had to support the production line changeovers. Dwelling on this, I approached the skilled trades that were preparing to perform a changeover. I asked them about the changeover, and what were the sticking points.
I allowed them to do a great deal of the talking. I listened to the challenges they had and why the changeovers took so long. [Read more…]
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…]