Articles

Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.

Beware of the Dangers of a Sample Size of One in Business Process Improvement

Modelling your process improvement initiative on another organization’s success is foolish—they are but a sample size of one!

A sample size of one success can also be due totally to luck. To guarantee your process improvement will be a complete certainty you must have repeated proof that what you copy will bring sure success to you too

We love great success stories: The wizard entrepreneur; the person who crusaded for a worthy cause; the champion athlete; the financial guru; the innovative business solution with astounding results; the failing firm that turned their fortunes around; the penniless emigrant whose wits made them wealthy. Those stories are inspirational. They challenge us to be better. They make us want to achieve more in our life roles and with our lives.

[Read more…]

by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Surviving the Recovery – part 1

Are you ready to ramp back up after your Covid-19 slowdown?

Part 1 – Did you fall into the reliability trap?

Covid scared us all! Here you can see two Red Pandas with their version of a threatening response. When threatened, we will have one of three reactions – fight, flight, or freeze.

Our businesses also have similar responses. A few have fought – and they “pivoted.” Some fled – they folded up and went away. Many simply froze – they halted just about everything. If your business froze, then this article is for you.

[Read more…]

by Bryan Christiansen Leave a Comment

4 Signs That Show Your Asset Reliability Program Is Outdated

Asset reliability programs are a set of initiatives for tracking the health, effectiveness and locations of both fixed and moveable assets. It involves routine maintenance, as well as the collection and analysis of equipment operating data to measure efficiency throughout their useful lives.

A good reliability engineering program provides insight on the frequency of asset failures, cost of operation, maintenance and repair, and the quality of maintenance work. Over time, an organization needs to evaluate metrics such as mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), and mean time to failure (MTTF) to ascertain the suitability of the selected maintenance strategy. [Read more…]

by Alex Williams Leave a Comment

Facility Maintenance Software: 5 Benefits of Barcoding Technology

Reduce data entry time and costly errors while boosting productivity by integrating your facilities management software with barcoding technology. Many vendors are offering this technology for facility maintenance software as an included feature or add-on to improve the timeliness and accuracy of data input in their CMMS/EAM systems.

[Read more…]

by Robert (Bob) J. Latino 2 Comments

How Can v Why: What’s the Difference?

When facilitating a Root Cause Analysis (RCA), the proper questioning process will make or break the effectiveness of the entire analysis. When we hear of the 5-Why’s as a valid RCA approach, is simply asking ‘Why?’ 5x good enough….or IS IT JUST OK?

Think about it this way, if I asked you ‘How Could’ the crime have occurred versus ‘Why’ the crime occurred, would your answers be different?

I am going to take a very basic (101) case study and format it using a logic tree (graphical expression of cause-and-effect logic). As we are guided through this mental process we will discuss the differences between asking ‘How Can?’ and ‘Why?’.

[Read more…]

by Andrew Kelleher 2 Comments

Why “Big Data” is NOT the Holy Grail for Process Plant Reliability Engineering

Data is good. Quality data is better. “Big data” is even fashionable. But it won’t help you solve a “small data” problem.

Let me guess. The quality of your CMMS data is not great, but if it was, you could really do something with it. Since decades, in fact. Just need to re-tweak those failure codes!

And recently, you were very tempted by a consultant’s new “data-driven” approach that promised to deliver staggering results. And why not?

Because it’s not a “big data” problem.

[Read more…]

by JD Solomon Leave a Comment

Effective Communication Is The #1 Thing That Changes Your Life

Effective communication is the one thing that makes your life better, more fulfilling, and more rewarding. That is equally true in personal relationships and in business.

Keep it simple. If you can convey the same information in fewer words, do it. If you can use fewer sentences, use fewer. If you can avoid tangents and parenthetical comments, avoid them. Only about 20 percent of what you normally communicate provides 80 percent of the influence on others.

[Read more…]

by JD Solomon Leave a Comment

The One Thing Your Approach to Communication & Facilitation is Missing

The one thing is right under your nose. The one thing is the game changer for your career because it enables others to understand the complex and uncertain world where you work. The one thing requires understanding the outcomes you seek before optimizing the separate components.

System Defined

A system is a collection of interrelated or interacting parts, each of which can affect the behavior or outcomes of the whole. One defining property of a system is that it provides a function that none of the parts can accomplish by themselves. The corollary is that a system is not the sum of the parts but the product of their interactions.

Simple examples include the mechanical advantage gained from a system of pulleys or a gearbox. Sports teams or work units are examples of human systems. Systems are essential aspects of our everyday lives.

[Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Smoke Alarms: How to Become More Proactive

Guest Post by Andrew Sheves (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Many people have a few smoke alarms dotted around their house and, to me, these are some of the most straightforward set-it-and-forget-it risk management tools you can get. You set these up and then…nothing. You can forget about them until that annoying ‘chirp’ sound wakes you up one night, telling you to change the battery.

And most people will never hear their smoke alarm go off except for those times that their cooking gets a little out of hand.

However, if there were a fire, they’d know about it immediately and be able to react.

[Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

How Plant Wellness Way Sites Get Zero Failures

The prime role of Maintenance is to reduce operating risk. Maintenance serves a business well when its use leads to lower production costs than using other choices that could have been taken. Too many managers think that they must maintain plant and equipment. Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. Maintenance is expensive and, as far as it is safe, use less costly answers. But if you do choose to do maintenance, then you ought to pick an operation’s maintenance strategy mix based totally on its effectiveness in delivering the least operating costs for the least maintenance cost.

[Read more…]

by James Reyes-Picknell 1 Comment

Look Before you Leap – Part 3

Get it right on paper before attempting to computerize and automate.

The Work Management Process. One of the biggest uses of IIoT, ML, and AI in the industry (so far) is in the field of condition monitoring and forecasting times to failure. IIoT devices deployed on your equipment and systems, send exception signals (they use edge computing to filter out the vast majority of the data that merely tells you “all is well”) over some sort of network (usually wireless), then some sort of software interface produces a message for you to read (maybe triggers and work request, or sounds an alarm) and then act on.

[Read more…]

by Joe Anderson 1 Comment

Self-Accountability Part 1

In the last blog, we discussed why Self-Awareness is the starting point for any real change. If you aren’t able to honestly know where you are, you’ll never get on the proper path towards where you want to go. The next step in making forward progress is understanding how you got to where you are.

This is where self-accountability comes into the conversation.

Simply put, self-accountability is the understanding that you are the combined result of all of the decisions you make, and actions that you take.

[Read more…]

by Larry George 2 Comments

What Price Required Data?

The title was inspired by Rupert Miller’s report “What Price Kaplan Meier?” That report compares nonparametric vs. parametric reliability estimators from censored age-at-failure data. This article compares alternative, nonparametric estimators from different data: grouped, censored age-at-failure data vs. population ships and returns data required by generally accepted accounting principles. This article compares data storage and collection requirements and costs, and bias, precision, and information of nonparametric reliability estimators.

[Read more…]

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

From Maker to Manager, Part 2: Becoming a Lifelong Learner

The first and most important aptitude needed to move from a maker mentality to a management or leadership mentality is that of a lifelong learner.

Now, I’ve heard plenty of people say, “I learn something new every day.” And it’s a cute adage. But watching the History Channel or scrolling mindlessly through YouTube videos won’t likely produce a leadership mindset.

Instead, lifelong learning is an ongoing, self-motivated journey of acquiring new, particularly in-demand skills. Lifelong learners develop and employ strategies and plans to acquire new career skills. These plans may involve returning to university to acquire a new degree, but they certainly don’t have to.

[Read more…]

by Karl Burnett Leave a Comment

Reliability and Sabotage the CIA Way

During World War Two, the Office of Special Services (OSS), the forerunner of today’s Central Intelligence Agency, compiled a manual on how to ruin a factory’s output without explosives. Their main weapon was bad maintenance.

The manual described ways that transportation and industrial workers could do their jobs but intentionally damage their plant and organization. The main idea was to do their jobs poorly, in a way where bad workmanship was plausibly accidental. Some of the targets were boilers, housekeeping, turbines, fusing, motors, tools, building heat, fuel storage, and lubricating oil systems.

[Read more…]