Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
For many in the maintenance field, the day-to-day tasks can feel routine. Fix a leaky faucet, replace a worn belt, and ensure everything is running smoothly – it’s a process that becomes second nature. But beneath the surface of these seemingly straightforward actions lies a critical component that can safeguard both worker safety and equipment longevity: the MSDS sheet, also known as the Safety Data Sheet (SDS). Let’s learn what does MSDS stand for. [Read more…]
The only true way to prevent asset failure is to prevent the causes of microstructure failure from occurring.
Machines fail when their component’s microstructure is degraded or deformed to a point where it can no longer bear the load. If you prevent degradation and deformation from occurring a machine and its components will provide an exceptional lifetime. However, you must do this at every phase of the asset’s life cycle to get world class reliability.
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It took us years to move from top-down to people-centric management, but the journey was worth it Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Throughout my career, I have spent a lot of time in the strategy room. But no matter what we decided there, until we got the organizational culture right, we were unsuccessful in executing our goals.
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Normal distribution is one of the foundation concepts in statistics and every quality and reliability professional must understand and able to apply this concept. There are already may videos on this subject, but Hemant Urdhwareshe has tried to make the concept as simple as possible in this video. Hemant has explained the history and basics of normal distribution and its properties. Hemant has further explained the concept of standard normal distribution and how to apply it to solve some typical problems using tables of standard normal distribution. You can download the tables from www.world-class-quality.com.
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The United States Conference of Mayors created a PFAS Toolkit. The information and resources included provides insights into several key aspects that local governments and businesses should be aware of in relation to PFAS (forever chemicals). Key parts of the PFAS Toolkit are presented here.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of chemicals developed in the 1940s that have been used in a variety of consumer products like semiconductors, cellphones, textiles, renewable energy, and medical devices. Two chemicals, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) are no longer produced today, but they were once used in a wide variety of industries. Today, trace levels of PFOA and PFOS can be measured in water, air, soil, animals, humans, and some consumer products globally. PFOA/PFOS are persistent in the environment, and some studies suggest that long-term exposure at increased doses may lead to negative health impacts. [Read more…]
The following is a recent discussion on the sister Linkedin NoMTBF Group. It was and may continue to be a great discussion. Please take a look and comment on where you stand. Do you have some form of the Arrhenius reaction rate equation in your reliability engineering work? Join the discussion here with a comment or on the Linkedin group conversion.
Fred
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In a minute you’ll know if your organisation has what it takes to achieve world class reliability performance. Use this audit tool to gauge your organisation’s capability to deliver outstanding reliability. Use its scale to plan how to improve it.
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Organisations that promote formalised and standardised risk management practices can create a risk culture where their employees view risk management as a compliance and tick-the-box exercise.
In comparison, organisations that intentionally promote a more informal environment where risk discussions and information sharing naturally occur as part of the broader organisational culture when making decisions can experience a positive risk culture.
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The Kaplan-Meier estimator is the maximum likelihood, nonparametric reliability estimator for censored, grouped lifetime data. It’s traditional. It’s in statistical software. Greenwood’s variance formula is well known. Could Kaplan-Meier be improved: smaller variance, better actuarial forecasts, seasonality, separate cohort variability from reliability? Could you estimate reliability without life data and preserve privacy?
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How do we select the appropriate system? What is the value and why do you need it? George Williams and Ramesh Gulati have it all covered.
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In this third and final installment in this series showcasing the most thought-provoking questions I’ve received from students of my online Root Cause Analysis class over the past five years, you will see a question each about the cause-and-effect diagram, capability analysis, and team building. This diverse set of questions, like the questions presented in the first two installments of this series, point plainly to the diversity of skills needed to become an effective quality or reliability professional.
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We are happy to release this video on Reliability Growth which is a very important strategy to assure reliability of new products. In this video, Hemant Urdhwareshe has explained the basic concepts and strategy of reliability growth, the related mathematical relationships, and the Duane Model with an application case study of introduction of new model of Diesel engine. Hemant is a Fellow of ASQ and is ASQ CRE, CMBB, CSSBB, CQE and CMQ/OE. We are sure that viewers will find it useful. If you like the video, do not forget to click the like button.
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Adding equipment redundancy to a system can improve uptime and reliability leading to increased output. When adding new equipment, it is cheaper to evaluate the benefits, or lack of thereof, on paper before implementing the change. Typically done as part of the design phase. However it can also happen after commissioning but its is more expensive. In other words, its better to get it right before “shovels go in the ground”.
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An excellent short white paper by Craig Hillman that is worth reading. It underscores why I claim HALT is the second worst 4 letter acronym in our profession.
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This article focuses on the task level of a project which is the key to merging the different methodologies. There is a lot of articles on line that explain what the merger will look like and the pros and cons of it but I found nothing to explain HOW TO DO IT? This article goes into quite a bit of detail but I felt I had no choice to convey to the reader how to merge the two methodologies with examples.
Agile was created for software development projects. Some of the key benefits of this methodology are flexibility, speed, high quality, and continuous improvement. These features are implemented at the Scrum level. One major problem with Agile is that it does not scale up to large projects due to lack of structure, changing requirements and scope, and lack of a baseline to measure project performance. In my opinion, it works well for small software and IT projects that are less than a year in duration and less than $1M in value
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