Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
The very best monitoring and measuring analysis you can do for your company’s maintenance success is to develop the distribution curves of your range of maintenance KPI’s.
At least they will be useful in the honest decision-making you need to do to continually become a better and better maintenance performer.
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“Water water everywhere, not a drop to drink” is the modern and well-known phraseology from the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”. In essence this means that despite being surrounded by an abundance of something one cannot benefit from it.
In today’s Information Age we are surrounded by data. It’s everywhere and often available at the touch of a button, or rather a screen. Instant and easy access is demanded but despite computers and the internet the right data is not always so easily or readily found. Data, and the right data is an essential ingredient for decision making.
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In the intricate web of industrial operations, maintenance, repairs, and operations (MRO) process development stands as the unsung hero, optimizing workflows, minimizing downtime, and ensuring the seamless continuity of production. It’s a craft that requires precision, strategic planning, and a knack for efficiency. Let’s embark on a journey to uncover the art of MRO process development and why it’s the lynchpin of high-quality operations.
[Read more…]Key Teaching Principle # 1 is the instructor demonstrates a solid understanding of fundamentals, speaking directly to students, and not reading slides.
“Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.” Plato
“Life calls not for perfection, but for completeness.” Carl Jung
One of the common FMEA questions that comes up is: When is an FMEA complete? You’d think it would be simple, but many organizations and practitioners get it wrong.
In this article, I’ll begin with the purpose of Design and Process FMEAs, and from there, we’ll examine two very different approaches to completing an FMEA.
Let’s think of this as a crowdsourced project. The first version of this book is a compilation of NoMTBF.com articles. It lays out why we do not want to use MTBF and what to do instead (to some extent).
With your input on success stories, how to make progress using better metrics, and input of examples, stories, case studies, etc., the next version of the book will be much better and much more practical.
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Welcome to the realm where reliability engineering meets product design—a landscape where innovation thrives on understanding and addressing customer pain points. In this guide, we will explore the intricate dance of empathy within the design thinking process, offering engineers and designers a roadmap to navigate the complexities of customer-centric problem-solving.
At the heart of the design thinking process lies the empathize phase—a journey that begins with a courageous act: wiping the slate clean of preconceived notions and biases. For seasoned professionals, this is akin to stepping into the unknown. Design thinking demands a reset—a departure from the comfort of accumulated solutions and a return to the essence of the problem.
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California senators introduced a new bill on pipeline safety – The Strengthening Pipeline Safety and Enforcement Act of 2011. A few key elements in the proposed legislature are:
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A business management system needs a quality management system built to make customers happy.
Every company already has a business management system they use to deliver products or services. If you want to be a more profitable business, you need to continually create a better management system.
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It took a long time to understand why a business in the same market did better than other businesses. Every one thought it was due to better marketing, or access to more capital. But it was not. It was simply that one business had products that better suited customer needs. The best product always gains most market share and makes the biggest profits. Which is why a business management system needs a quality management system that improves their products.
Just how safe is “safe”? Should working in a chemical plant have the same level of risk as skydiving (which kills about 40 people per year in the U.S.A Should working in a plant be as safe as driving your car? Or should it be as safe as flying in a plane, which is safer than driving a car by two orders of magnitude?
While the term FAR may be simple to understand and may represent a useful yardstick, many companies, especially in the U.S., are unwilling to put such targets in writing. Imagine walking into company XYZ’s plush world headquarters office and on the wall in the reception area is a sign that reads, “We at XYZ consider it tolerable to kill 4 people per 100-million-man hours.” The lawyers would have a field day! However, as we shall see, some organizations have established such quantified risk targets.
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What is the purpose of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)? Why do RCM? As Reliability professionals, we are not in the business of preventing all failures. Sometimes it’s impossible to predict or prevent some Failure Modes. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything about it. RCM helps us figure other actions we can take to manage the consequences of failure.
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The UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) reported the following offshore safety statistics on for 2009-10 period.
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There is a definite distinction between Reliability Engineers (RE) and Maintenance Engineers (ME). Although they are highly dependant on each other. REs rely a lot on MEs and vice versa. However, those roles are often confused let also not well understood by recruiters, managers or regrettably, even professionals in the roles.
In a Reliabilityweb.com article, Paul Barringer provides a good summary of this distinction. He also underlines the vital partnership between those specialties. Some aspects highlighted by Barringer are:
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Abstract: With nearly four (4) decades of experience in Reliability, Maintenance and Safety in my rear-view mirror now, I’ve gotten to pondering about what have I actually learned? What has been my purpose? For those who don’t know me you can learn more about my career pathway by visiting my LinkedIn Profile. In short, I’ve been a practitioner, consultant, educator, author, businessman, mentor and thought-influencer (don’t like the term ‘Leader’, sounds too cocky).
Given all this ‘wisdom’ (polite term for dues paid in years or the state of being ‘old-er’), what have I really learned?
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The “Easier to Read’ series on writing tips helps reliability professionals make their reports easier to understand. The series heps technical professionals gain an understanding of how social media has impacted traditional writing. In some cases, the shift is obviously toward shorter, direct styles. In other cases, the shift returns to good practices that we have simply forgotten. Either way, the shift is real and impacts all of our reliability reports and other forms of technical communication.
Most of my inspiration comes from the people and projects we encounter through our consulting practice, JD Solomon Solutions. Such was the case here.
A few months ago, one of the technical professionals on a reliability assessment project commented that I posted a lot of articles on social media. He asked what I got out of it, and I replied that one of the things was improved writing. I suggested he give it a try. The idea for the series came when he asked me to give him some tips on how to get started.
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