Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Understanding and Using Human Factors for Human Error Prevention and Mistake Proofing Gets You a Great Safety Advantage
There are many businesses around, even national and international sized companies, who have done an OHS risk assessment for their operations and still have poor workplace safety performance and lousy safety statistics. Clearly they got something seriously wrong when they undertook their operational health and safety (OHS) risk assessment process.
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Imagine observing inputs and outputs of a self-service system, without individual service times. How would you estimate the distribution of service time without following individuals from input to output? The maximum likelihood estimator for an M/G/Infinity self-service-time distribution function from ships and returns counts works for nonstationary arrival process M(t)/G/Infinity self-service systems, under a condition. A constant or linearly increasing arrival (ships) rate satisfies the condition. If you identify outputs by failure mode then you could estimate reliability by failure mode or quantify reliability growth, without life data. [Read more…]
Let’s do a quick recap of where we’ve come from. First we had to figure out where you are on your journey to success, in a totally honest way, which we covered in the chapter of Self-Awareness.
Next we had learned how to hold ourselves accountable for what got us to where we are today. We discussed how to create a personal development plan to map out our different responsibilities in life, what those mean in specific, day-to-day terms, and how to monitor and measure our success on aiming for and achieving those goals.
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In December 2005, fire and explosion at Buncefield oil storage depot injured 40 people. Overfilling of a fuel storage tank (Tank 912) led to release of unleaded gasoline (petrol) which formed a cloud of flammable vapor that subsequently ignited.
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There was a lot to unpack from the 45-minute information session. After all, three different governmental units evaluated the issue for over three years. We had not had a debriefing on the issue in a year. And the issue was an emerging one, ripe with complexity and uncertainty. Effective communication can be difficult in these types of information sessions.
I am often asked about the application of detection in FMEAs. When and how to assess for the risk of detection can be confusing. Here are some pointers for when and how to use detection in an FMEA.
Andy Benoit once said, “Most geniuses — especially those who lead others — prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”
This statement is so true when corporate leaders and managers tend to over-complicate processes or over-engineer systems in organizations. Designing and implementing your organization’s enterprise-wide risk management system is no exception.
[Read more…]The Rate of Occurrence of Failure (ROCOF) curve is the sum of all the individual component failure curves across the service life of an asset. As shown below, it looks like a bathtub, giving it the nickname, a bathtub curve.
Equipment reliability is malleable by choice of policy and quality of practice.
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Another of the most commonly asked questions about quality engineering is “What is Six Sigma and how is it used in quality engineering?”
Six Sigma is a data-driven approach to continuous improvement that aims to reduce defects and variability in products, processes, and systems. It is based on the idea that by identifying and addressing the root causes of defects and variability, organizations can significantly improve the quality of their products and processes. Six Sigma is used to identify and eliminate defects and variability by collecting and analyzing data, identifying patterns and trends, and implementing process improvements.
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The U.S. Government has extended the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) to 2014. TRIA is intended to support insurance companies in case the claims from a terror incident go above a certain threshold.
What is interesting are the exclusions used by the government for this reinsurance.
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Despite their shared emphasis on maintenance, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) are not competing strategies.
Manufacturers can create a powerful synergy to leverage the strengths of each if they understand their respective strengths. Such a combination leads to exceptional reliability, cost-effective maintenance, and improved corporate culture – if implemented successfully. [Read more…]
There are a lot of keen insights in the 2022 FINESSE guest articles for improving communication skills. Looking back on this bold collection reminds me that much good work, and systems thinking, is still needed for as we move into the future.
Is there a single theme that we can gain from the 2022 guest articles that makes it easier to communicate information related to work-related decisions with complexity and uncertainty? Is there one thing we can do to be an effective trusted advisor? The answer to both is “not really.” [Read more…]
The late quality guru W. Edwards Deming advised graphing the process variables and the process outputs across time on a run chart (a time-series plot) to identify uncertainty and variability. When the run charts are used together, they help to identify the times and causes of poor results.
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Are project risks round? Curved objects can be less controllable than planar ones as they pitch, roll and yaw; and the tighter their curves the more difficult control becomes. Even a truly planar surface is, geometrically, a curve but with an infinite radius. The Earth’s horizon, that imaginary plane perpendicular to its radius is considered by some to be ‘flat’ but in reality it’s a sphere so we can never see over the horizon. But what has this got to do with project risk?
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Nonparametric, age-specific field reliability estimates helped deal with a Customer’s bad experience using a Hewlett-Packard part in the Customer’s product: 110 part failures out of 3001 shipped in the first five months. Comparison of HP population vs. Customer reliability estimates showed the Customer’s infant mortality was not typical. Using population ships and failures or returns data eliminated sample uncertainty from the HP population field reliability estimate.
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