Production processes come to a grinding halt when equipment breaks down. This results in production delays, costs incurred to fix the machine, and opportunity costs. The production process cannot proceed until the maintenance activity on the faulty machine is complete — unless you have provisioned equipment redundancy. [Read more…]
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Have You Considered Inherently Safer Alternatives?

Inherently safer philosophy represents a slightly different approach to risk mitigation. Instead of focusing on mitigating risks, an inherently safer alternative focuses on eliminating the hazards.Let us look at couple of inherently safer examples.
[Read more…]Maintenance – Necessary Evil or Value Creator?

Guest post by Ken Latino.
Have you ever noticed how much emphasis is put on the maintenance budget in an industrial facility? While maintenance cost is usually just a fraction of what is spent on other costs like raw materials, energy costs and other input costs, it get 95% of the attention. This is because many think that every dollar spent on maintenance is a wasted dollar. With this attitude, it causes those at the plant level to make extremely difficult decisions of cost versus risk. The lower the budget, the more risk has to be taken.
[Read more…]Use An Isocorrosion Diagram To Recognize High Corrosion Situations

Use an Isocorrosion Diagrams To Recognise High Corrosion Situations And Design Process Equipment Accordingly. A true story of how a high nickel alloy (Alloy 28) reactor was holed in 8 weeks by sulphuric (sulfuric) acid running down the inside wall. When the situation was reviewed in detail using an iso-corrosion diagram for the alloy in sulphuric acid it was obvious that such a problem would occur. The iso-corrosion curves clearly showed the huge corrosion rates that would happen at local contact points within the reactor. A clear and detailed understanding of how to use iso-corrosion curves would have highlighted the problem at the design stage.
[Read more…]About Agile 2

Guest Post by Howard M. Wiener (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Iterative software development approaches have been around since the 1950s but many mark the beginning of what is commonly thought of as Agile as the creation of the Agile Manifesto, a document written by a number of software engineers in 2001, which contains 12 principles that serve as guidelines to how software projects should be conducted. Since then, professional services and product organizations have taken Agile and bent and twisted it into proprietary commercial forms for their own gain.
[Read more…]Explaining Maintenance Infographic

Maintenance, failures, design for reliability, use of RCM and predictive technologies explained in infographic. Leave some feedback so we can make it better.
[Read more…]Lithium Battery Fires: Why Your Laptop Can Catch On Fire?

Because of their dependability and long effective lifespan, lithium ion rechargeable batteries are used in almost all modern electronic gadgets – cell phones, laptops, digital cameras, power tools, video games, PDA, household devices, e-bikes, security lighting, iPods, and automobiles. As the electronic market grows, it is evident that the lithium battery market will grow exponentially!
In rare cases, lithium batteries can catch fire – often in dramatic ways.
[Read more…]Water Works and Railroad Employee Manuals

In 1873, the superintendent of the Montreal Water Works signed out a manual for his organization:
“Rules and regulations for the employés [sic] in the department of the Montreal Water Works”
[Read more…]Test Reliability Targets and Expected Field Reliability

An example of an automotive validation test reliability target is R97C50. In this case, the objective of the validation effort would be to demonstrate at one life on test, with 50% confidence, that the product has a reliability of 97% or better.
Does this mean that a field failure rate of 3% can be expected?
[Read more…]Texas Black Swan Event

Guest Post by John Ayers (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
A black swan event has a very low probability of happening but if it does the consequences are devastating. The black swan event for Texas was the weather and the consequence was catastrophic to their power grid. Prior to the February 2021 snowstorm with freezing temperatures, you must go back to December 1929 to find the last historical Texas snowstorm. The storm lasted for 24 hours dropping 12 inches of snow with freezing temperatures. But they did not have natural gas, windmills and solar panels to worry about like today.
[Read more…]Annex SL Structure for ISO 55001 Asset Management Documentation in a EAM System Manual

WHEN YOU BUILD AN ASSET MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR ISO 55001 CERTIFICATION THE ISO 55001 EAM SYSTEM MANUAL NEEDS TO COMPLY WITH THE ANNEX SL DOCUMENT STRUCTURE.
Here’s a practical way to create an ISO 55001 EAM system manual that covers all bases for both ISO 55001 certification and Annex SL requirements. Annex SL stipulates ten sections that every management system built to an ISO management system standard must contain. But matching legacy enterprise asset management 9EAM) system documents to Annex SL sections can be tricky.
[Read more…]Transient Markov Model of Multiple Failure Modes

COVID-19 Case Fatality Rate (CFR) is easy to estimate: CFR=deaths/cases. Regression forecasts of COVID-19 cases and deaths are easy but complicated by variants and nonlinearity. Epidemiologists use SIR models (Susceptible, Infectious, and “Removed”) to estimate Ro. These are baseball statistics. Reliability people need age-specific reliability and failure-rate function estimates, by failure mode, to diagnose problems, recommend spares, plan maintenance, do risk analyses, etc. Markov models use actuarial transition rates.
[Read more…]One of the Biggest RCM Misconceptions

You must have comprehensive “historical data” in order to carry out Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) (misconception)
Historical data is important for a Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) analysis. But the kind of data that is generally collected isn’t sufficient to answer all the questions in the RCM process – and thereby formulate specific solutions.
[Read more…]Green Safety: Manage Risks Arising From Green Technologies

Green is “In”.
Consumers, retail stores, and corporate policies are all going green.
But just because you have a green technology does not mean you have ZERO risks. Let me give you a couple of examples.
[Read more…]Pugh Analysis and FMEA

“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are times when an FMEA facilitator has difficulty arriving at consensus with the FMEA team. This sometimes happens when there are two or more competing ideas or solutions and members of the team feel strongly about their personal idea or solution. One tool that can be used to solve this problem is called Pugh Analysis, a type of decision matrix.