Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
The true cost of maintenance to a company includes the lost production time, cost of utilities not used, overhead costs, handover costs and more.
A 6-step procedure that guides you and your organization, department, and team to analyze your business and operational risks, and develop an enterprise asset management system that is purpose-built to deliver your organization world class reliability.
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Some managers resist outside help to make improvement in how they are managing reliability and maintenance. They think they can “get back to basics” first and then re-assess. They fail to see that if they could really do that on their own, they wouldn’t have allowed the slide to where they are today.
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In this video, we’re exploring the best way to conduct a Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) analysis. When it comes to RCM, there’s definitely a “recipe” for success that includes two key ingredients: firsthand knowledge of the equipment and its operating environment, and a strong understanding of RCM principles and how to apply them.
We’ll break down three common approaches to RCM—outsourcing, single analyst, and the facilitated working group approach. Discover why the facilitated working group approach stands out as the best way to ensure a comprehensive, effective RCM analysis. I’m Nancy Regan, and I hope you enjoy the video!
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Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO) and the management of spare parts inventory (stores) are often overlooked elements in a framework. However, they play a critical role in ensuring that maintenance teams have the right tools, parts, and materials needed to keep assets running efficiently. Without a well-structured MRO and stores strategy, even the most proactive maintenance programs can suffer from delays, unplanned downtime, and excessive costs.
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DYNAMICS OF HEAT IN COMMERCIAL PIZZA OVEN MECHANISMS
Thermal stress on shafts leads to premature failure. Understanding the factors that influence the bending forces of shafts and implementing counter measures can significantly increase their longevity.
Commercial pizza ovens are engineering marvels designed for a singular, high-intensity purpose: the rapid and consistent delivery of heat to dough and toppings. Operating at temperatures frequently exceeding 800 degrees Fahrenheit, these systems rely on a complex interplay of radiation, convection, and conduction. While the culinary focus is on the crust, the mechanical burden falls squarely on the internal components, most notably the heavy-duty shafts that drive conveyor systems and rotating decks. These components serve as the backbone of the operation, inside large, industrial-sized ovens where they undergo extensive temperature gradients.
In this article, we will observe the factors that influence bending forces and their countermeasures.
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Most equipment failures have no relationship to length of time in-service. Most failures are unpredictable. But if you detect a future failure early, you can plan and do the repair cost effectively before it becomes a breakdown.
With only about 15% to 20% of your equipment failures being age related, and the other 80% to 85% being totally time-random events, how can you improve the uptime of your plant and facility? This article explains how to detect the random failures that make-up the vast majority of maintenance expense and production downtime by using simple, low cost condition monitoring methods.Keywords: equipment condition monitoring, random equipment failure, equipment failure patterns
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If you’ve worked in reliability or maintenance for any length of time, you’ve probably sat through a meeting where someone asks “so how many spares do we need?” and the answer is basically “well, we’ve always kept two on the shelf.” Or the classic PM frequency debate — why is it every 6 months? Because it’s always been every 6 months.
That kind of thing bugged me. Not because people are lazy, but because the right tools to do it properly are usually locked behind expensive software or buried in a textbook somewhere. So I built four free, browser-based calculators that cover the core decisions reliability engineers deal with all the time. No logins, no licence fees, no fluff. [Read more…]
Welcome to Storytime! In this video, I’m sharing the most valuable lesson my mentor, John Moubray, taught me. Years ago, I visited John and his wife at their home in Asheville, North Carolina. When I arrived, the first thing he asked me was, “Look around my house and tell me what’s missing.” I had already noticed that there wasn’t a single TV in sight. John believed that time is our most precious asset, far more valuable than money, and he didn’t want to waste a moment of it.
This story left a deep impression on me, and I carry it with me to this day. Time is the great equalizer—we all get 24 hours a day, and it’s up to us to decide how we use it. Thank you for choosing to spend some of yours with me today!
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Spot component failures before they happen using thermal imaging. Every component failure has a classic signature, a fingerprint. Observing this fingerprint overtime displays the type of impending failure and what actions to take now to prevent expensive unplanned downtime.
Have you ever seen a component look fine only to have it fail without warning?
Chances are that the heat told the story first. Thermal imaging is one of the most powerful tools in the Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) toolkit. It turns invisible heat patterns into actionable insight and when used right, thermal imaging can detect component problems before they lead to catastrophic failure days or even weeks before they happen.
In this article, we will address the following:
My father is an industrial engineer/ manager (retired). He spent his career in maintenance and operations management, and growing up, I absorbed a principle so fundamental that it shaped how I see the world: if you want something to last, you have to look after it.
It wasn’t complicated philosophy. It was watching him maintain the family car religiously—not because it was broken, but because he understood what neglect would cost later. It was seeing him make sure the wooden fence always had a healthy coating of Carbolineum and the gutters were cleared before the rainy season arrived. The lesson was simple: care for things before they demand it, and they’ll serve you well. Ignore them, and they’ll fail you at the worst possible moment.
This principle is obvious to anyone who’s grown up around machinery. Yet somehow, in the complexity of industrial operations, it gets lost. Maintenance teams fight for resources, justify their existence, and struggle to communicate their value to organisations that measure success in tonnes and throughput. Production teams, under relentless pressure to hit targets, see maintenance as a necessary interruption at best—and an obstacle at worst.
The root of this disconnect isn’t ignorance or bad intention. It’s something more fundamental: the success of maintenance is invisible. [Read more…]
Reliability Engineering has a bias that is both practical and measurable: simpler systems tend to be more reliable. This is not a philosophical preference for elegance; it is an outcome rooted in how failures occur, how they propagate through architectures, and how uncertainty accumulates when complexity grows. When we say “simple,” we do not mean “unsophisticated.” We mean fewer parts, fewer interfaces, fewer operating modes, fewer dependencies, and fewer opportunities for human and environmental variability to turn into functional failures.
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Demographic shifts in the workforce have given us “younger” companies with less experience and little guidance other than the way we were “raised”. Has the way you were raised left you with a mindset that is getting in your own way?
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Nuclear power stations, nuclear warships and air traffic control centers are renowned amongst industry world-wide for their high-reliability performance. Here is a reliability-based model of how they do it. Your organisation can too.
Keywords: control of human error, failure prevention, defect elimination, accuracy-controlled enterprise, error-proofing
My brother-in-law, who worked for Japan Airlines (JAL) at the time, tells a story of watching Japanese aircraft maintenance technicians overhaul a JAL airplane jet engine. He tells this story because it is so unusual. During his visit to the maintenance hanger he was enthralled by the extraordinary maintenance procedure that the JAL technicians followed.
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Time-based PM variation.
The First Maintenance Lesson I Ever Learned—and How It Applies to Reliability Today
In today’s storytime, I’m sharing the first maintenance lesson I ever learned, back when I was eleven years old and eager to change the oil in my father’s car. As you’ll see, this experience taught me a valuable lesson about quality assurance and accountability—and it reveals one of the biggest mistakes many Reliability Teams make today.
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