Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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.
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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 2nd, 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…]
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…]
Welcome to part eight 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.
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…]
Improving reliability is easier said than done.
Often times you can develop great PM routines, improve equipment and have the right processes in place, but reliability doesn’t improve. Why is that?
It all comes down to people. People are the heart of reliability, whether they run the equipment or maintain it.
Changing people’s perception of reliability can be a very difficult task. So where do we start?
When trying to implement such change, you will often hear of change management and change framework.
This is a great exercise and contributes greatly to success. But what if you are a Maintenance Supervisor who needs a tangible action that you can run with? [Read more…]
This is the wheel of the Curiosity Rover after millions of rotations on Mars.
This is how I feel after I ask customers about legacy product performance. [Read more…]
Book being reviewed is “Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook 3/E
Keywords: maintenance planning, scheduling, planner, performance, productivity, planner. [Read more…]