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How Can Companies Stop Their Machines Failing?

How Can Companies Stop Their Machines Failing?

 Plant and equipment failures are business process failures. Plant stoppages and breakdowns result from failure-causing practices built into business processes and from leaving the right reliability practices out of them. Processes may superficially look okay because they have documentation, charts and records, but if you suffer a steady stream of failures, problems, and rework, then your processes contain unforeseen ‘traps’ into which your people and equipment regularly fall. Failure was not intended when your processes were chosen and designed, but failure is what happens when they are used.

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Why Agile Software Often Fails and What to Do About It

Why Agile Software Often Fails and What to Do About It

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

In the previous articles in this series, we discussed the role that agile digital delivery capabilities plays in your company’s competitiveness and why rapid delivery is so important.  In this article, we will look at the many reasons that Agile adoptions frequently fail to deliver what companies expect and suggest some things that you should do to address them.

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What Kinds of Assets can RCM be Applied to?

What Kinds of Assets can RCM be Applied to?

Air, sea, space, land, or underground? Commercial, government, or military? Reliability Centered Maintenance has something for everyone!

Absolutely.  In fact, in Stanley Nowlan and Howard Heap’s book on RCM, they state:

The content of scheduled-maintenance programs developed by experienced practitioners of MSG-2 techniques may be quite similar to the programs resulting from RCM analysis, but the RCM approach is more rigorous, and there should be much more confidence in its outcome.  The RCM technique can also be learned more quickly and is more readily applicable to complex equipment other than transport aircraft.

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Maintenance Tactics: A Practical Guide to Balancing Cost, Reliability, and Risk

Maintenance Tactics: A Practical Guide to Balancing Cost, Reliability, and Risk

In most industries we ideally want the lowest-cost maintenance strategy, one that balances risk of unplanned vs planned maintenance costs to a lifetime minimum.

This is what we’ve calculated in a previous article HERE, and this article/exercise is a follow-on from this.

The downside of using this method is that it may select a maintenance interval where the inherent reliability of the component at changeout time is less than is required for operational reasons, or that we’re not getting the best “increase in reliability vs marginal cost” value. [Read more…]

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No … 89 percent of Failures are NOT Random

No … 89 percent of Failures are NOT Random

I am constantly confronted by students, reliability engineers and other people banging fists on tables and saying …

… 89 percent of failures are random …

Firstly, 100 percent of failures are random. It’s just that there are lots of textbooks and experts telling us that a ‘random’ failure is one that happens irrespective of age. That is, a failure with a constant ‘failure rate’ where the item in question doesn’t appear to age or wear out.

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FINESSE Fishbone: The N Stands for Noise Reduction

FINESSE Fishbone: The N Stands for Noise Reduction

The N in the FINESSE fishbone diagram stands for Noise reduction. Cause-and-effect relationships and systems thinking are essential aspects of any communication system. We normally think of noise in four forms – the way people mentally process information, the types of forums where we present, visual and auditory effects, and communication channels. These three tips and a video clip provide focused examples.

Make Sure Your Message Is Clear

Few technical professionals fully leverage the editing tools or consistently apply the techniques to Google, Adobe, Microsoft, or social media applications. From word count to spoken words to readability, this article touches on key approaches to making your reports and presentations more concise.

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Statistical Distribution – is this really important?

Statistical Distribution – is this really important?

Statistical distribution – it has important role in general life and of course in engineering specifically. So, what is all about? 

During morning commute either by bus or vehicle, you take some budget of time. From your daily routine experience, you with very high probability, can predict arrival time. You also know how much time it will take, in less ordinary cases, like slippery roads, or cars accident along you route. 

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Asset Management Fundamentals

Asset Management Fundamentals

First master the fundamentals

Basketball Olympic Gold Medallist Larry Bird

The industrial world today is abuzz with a lot of terminologies and jargons mainly stemming from today’s technological advances in the areas of sensors, data, communication and electronics. Each day brings in something new for the Asset Owners from the service providers who claim that their technology, product or service is ‘unique’ and has been ‘never seen before’. While a lot of these offerings are innovative in many aspects, the real question lies in how do they fit within the ‘fundamentals of the Asset Management’? [Read more…]

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The Business of Providing MTBF

The Business of Providing MTBF

What Price Providing MTBF?

What good is your service if your livelihood consists of providing MTBF upon request?

Sure, you earn some money, yet did the customer receive value in the transaction? As you know, or should know, MTBF is so commonly misunderstood that the customer is likely to be confused about what they want, reliability or MTBF. Providing them with MTBF does not answer their question.

Worse, the customer thinks they got something of value and blithely heads off with rather meaningless information.

My contention is to provide MTBF because the customer’s request is wrong. We know better. Those performing predictions, doing data analysis, and other reliability engineering work know that MTBF is a faulty and rather meaningless metric often confused with reliability, R(t). (probability of success over a duration). [Read more…]

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Safety is Integral to Engineering Education

Safety is Integral to Engineering Education

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

All this knowledge, passed on for our Engineers, is of little use unless it reaches the right people. The individuals and institutions which educate the safety engineers and who will be responsible for the design and operation of plants handling hazardous materials have a duty to make their students aware of the hazards and at least to make a start in gaining competence in handling them.

As elsewhere in engineering, computers are in wide-spread use in the design of process plants, where computer aided design (CAD) covers physical properties, flow sheeting, piping and instrument diagrams, unit operations and plant layout. There is increasing use of computers for failure data retrieval and analysis, reliability and availability studies, fault tree analysis and consequence modelling, while more elusive safety expertise is being captured by computer-based expert systems.

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MTBF Confidence Intervals using tables and Excel Template

MTBF Confidence Intervals using tables and Excel Template

In this video, Hemant Urdhwareshe explains concept of Confidence Intervals for Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF). The concept is explained for time terminated and failure terminated tests. The calculation is illustrated with Chi-square distribution tables and also Excel Template created by IoQR. The video would be useful to those who want to learn these concepts and learn how to calculate MTBF confidence intervals using tables. It will be beneficial to those who wish to take ASQ CRE, CQE, Six Sigma Black Belt and CMBB certification exams.

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The Synergy of Structured Problem Solving and Statistical Tools

The Synergy of Structured Problem Solving and Statistical Tools

Co-authored by Mike Vella and Ray Harkins

How many times have we heard that we must tolerate poor process performance because it’s “the nature of the beast” or its excess variability is considered “normal”? How much does financial performance suffer due to allowances for alarming levels of scrap, low yields, or losses considered “best practice” for the industry? Improving these situations requires a great team, supportive management, and cooperative suppliers. Beyond the support, operations and quality leaders must know a systematic method of problem-solving and have access to statistical tools to drive the data through to a solution.

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