Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
The reactivity of a chemical or a mixture is normally assessed by thermal analysis. Thus the thermal analysis data forms the basis of risk mitigation decisions. What does the thermal analysis data tell us and how to base risk mitigation decisions? How to tell which compositions are more reactive and should be scrutinized closely?
Missing from the current body of knowledge is a simple classification to help rank compositions in order of their reactivity.
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After 30 minutes of being on hold, I wasn’t sure what to expect from customer service for a product reliability issue. The scratchy soundtrack didn’t foretell a great experience either.
Once connected to a company representative, we resolved the issue quickly and satisfactorily. Unfortunately, that was a pleasant surprise. All too often, the frequently repeated “Your call is important to us.” (an Amazon affiliate link) just isn’t true, in my experience.
Did you know that customer service can add significant value to an organization, especially when product reliability doesn’t meet customers’ expectations? Besides providing the team with valuable product reliability performance information for past products, the service team can improve customer loyalty.
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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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Sometimes it is easier to start with what not to do. That is often the case for technically trained professionals who are often not the best natural communicators. Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and international standards for the visually and hearing impaired provide good guardrails.
These are five basics that should be considered as a minimum standard.
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In a previous article I discussed the degradation of materials due to exposure to stressors (use conditions) and how to identify stressors. Cracks form and grow in axles and shafts due to cyclic stress, steel screws corrode when exposed to water, some plastics become brittle when exposed to sunlight, and coatings on surfaces can wear away. When too much degradation occurs, components and joints fail, leading to product failure.
If you’re someone who likes to design reliable products, you must think about the stressors and their effects. When designing a product, we must identify the following things [Read more…]
Every organization and organism’s performance is limited to the capability of its design. If you want better business results, then get or build a new organization with systems designed to naturally deliver the outcomes and profits you want. Nothing else you do will ever work as well!
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Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is becoming an important topic and activity worldwide. This is in part because of COVID 19. COVID 19 focused the public’s attention on health risks. As the world comes out of the pandemic crisis, the focus, particularly in government, will be on other risks. Already, in the United States, cities which defunded the police, are reallocating money back due to rising crime. However, because of the political atmosphere and retirement of senior officers, cities are having trouble recruiting enough people to fill the vacated ranks. Adding to this problem are the consequences of riots and work from home. In many urban areas, the result has been a hollowing out of the urban core.
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Reliability engineering and quality engineering are closely related disciplines that both focus on ensuring that products, processes, and systems are efficient, effective, and meet the required standards. As such, there are several ways in which reliability engineers can improve their skills by learning about quality engineering.
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Preservation and repair are as old as sailing, but a written record of how this was managed has not always survived. One failure mechanism that has affected wooden vessels for centuries is shipworm – a mollusc that drills deep holes into the hull.
Shipworm was common in the Mediterranean, so there is a long record of means to combat it. A shipwreck in Kyrenia has been dated to somewhere between 384 BC – 288 BC. The hull was covered with hammered lead sheathing to protect it from shipworm. Archaeological examination concluded that over its lifetime, the ship had received four major repairs, and in-service modification. The Kyrenia ship first sailed with no sheathing, but wooden sheathing was added. Later, lead sheathing was used. (Steffy p. 95) Archeologists have also observed the use of oche on ship hulls in the Mediterranean and debate if the purpose was preservation of the hull. Several Greek and Roman ships with lead sheathing have been studied. By 1514, Spain was using lead sheathing. An Englishman who had served the Spanish crown sheathed a small English squadron with lead sheathing in 1553. (Wilkinson p. 132) In 1624, Monson wrote in Monson’s Tracts that the Spanish and Portuguese used lead sheathing, but that it was “not durable” so not in use in England.
The major cause of natural gas pipeline rupture is not corrosion or material defect but external damage.
External damage is the damage to pipeline during digging, pilling, ground work, etc. by heavy equipment such as anchor, bulldozer, excavator, or plough. Moreover typically the external damage is from third party construction activities and not the pipeline owner-operator.
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Reliability and systems engineers are in it for the long game. Their work feeds big decisions that take months or years to evaluate and must pass through many levels of management. Big decisions are filled with complexity (many interrelated parts) and uncertainty (unknown beyond doubt or not clearly defined). This article provides several key observations about uncertainty and five tips on how to drive out uncertainty with FINESSE.
Uncertainty refers to situations involving imperfect or unknown information. It applies to predictions of future events, to physical measurements that are already made, or to the unknown. Uncertainty arises in partially observable environments and is due to ignorance, indolence, or both (Norvig and Thrun).
Technical professionals drive toward collecting more data – more knowledge – but is that really what decision-makers care about?
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There are only two ways to get high system reliability if you want a highly reliable system. Equipment in an operation can be configured in series or in parallel. In series, one item connects sequentially to the other. In parallel, each item is arranged as a companion, where one duplicates the other.
A series arrangement needs exceptionally reliable individual equipment to get a highly reliable system. A parallel arrangement can form a highly reliable system even if individual equipment has poor reliability.
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We are in an interesting time in history, when transformative digital disruptions have their foot on the gas and are accelerating at exponential rates. Every industry is facing disruption in a multitude of ways, and it is now up to business leaders and their organizations to implement my Anticipatory Organization® Model and understand and identify the future certainties of Hard Trends and how to leverage them to become the disruptor before someone else does.
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When working with a team creating a new system, I always ask, “what is the goal?” The answers often do not make much sense. The team using SMART reliability goals are astonishingly well-stated.
The difference that makes a goal, objective, or requirement practical and useful is summed up by SMART. A SMART goal is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Let’s explore each element as related to a reliability goal.
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According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), there were 11 deaths every 100,000 workers in India in 2005. This number was two in the US and 0.01 in Japan. What is scary is that the number of fatalities may be significantly underestimated because of absence of a formal accident tracking system. I suspect the situation in other developing nations isn’t significantly different.
Why is the fatality rate in the industrial sectors in the developing nations so high?
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