Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
All articles listed in reverse chronological order.
Read about the Requirements for the Content of the ISO 9001 Quality Manual Lead Document from which the rest of an ISO 9001 Quality System Cascades
An ISO 9001 Quality Management System requires a ISO 9001 Quality Manual that contains all the details of how your business is run to produce your products or services to a quality standard.
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CBM or Condition-Based Maintenance is a maintenance approach that includes these five facts:
A good mental framework to have is that instead of you pushing towards accomplishing goals, you think about what things you have to “pull” to get to the end game. The subtle shift in the thinking will position you to find more creative solutions to problems. A very frequent problem with management who doesn’t really know how to solve problems is saying things like “work harder”. If we just turn up the Hard Work Dial to 11, then the problems will go away, obviously. Instead if we looked at what is stopping the success and actively worked on removing those problems, we’d be able to remove the stress of failure without having to break the Hard Work Dial.
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In 1653, “An Act for Constituting Commissioners for Ordering And Managing the Affairs of the Admiralty And Navy” established the responsibilities of the Admiralty and Commissioners of the Navy. The Commissioners were to make policy for building, fitting out, “repairing and preserving,” and “sale and disposal of old and unserviceable ships and vessels.” Another duty was to conduct a survey (i.e. an inventory) of the nation’s ships and naval stores, an element carried over from Monson’s Tracts in 1624.
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We all know that air is mostly nitrogen…79% to be precise. What may not be a common knoweldge is that colorless odorless Nitrogen has led to asphyxiation and fatalities and is a risk particularly for personnel working in confined spaces and personnel utilizing breathing air systems.
According to the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) research there were 80 nitrogen asphyxiation fatalities between 1992-2002. This translates to one nitrogen asphyxiation death every seven weeks. Approximately, 10% of fatalities were due to attempts to rescue person in confined spaces.
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This video provides a summary of the Prelical Solution’s Practical Reliability process. For more information, contact us at info@prelical.com or visit our website at prelical.com.
This video will provide a practical framework for implementing a reliability process at your company. Tips on how to develop an effective asset strategy, execution of that strategy and how to evaluate the results of the strategy in the field.
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Qualitative assessments are used in various applications, including asset management, risk management, human reliability analysis, and customer surveys. The usefulness of any qualitative assessment is a function of design, analysis, and administration. Facilitation plays a pivotal role.
Facilitators should understand the strengths and weaknesses of the qualitative assessments we facilitate and design. Qualitative assessments measure the opinions, attitudes, knowledge, perceived behaviors, observations, beliefs, and experiences of individuals who use a system the most. The correct understanding is fundamental as we lead participants to solutions that are created, understood, and accepted by all. [Read more…]
Teams, they are everywhere; sports teams, project teams, political parties, rock bands, military units, the list goes on. The team isn’t just about the people in the limelight it’s also about the backroom boys and girls who provide logistical, technical, administrative, and sometime moral support to the front men and women. Even the lone competitor or the one-man-band needs some support; everybody needs somebody sometime.
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Questions and queries asked following a screw feeder shaft breakage on a 15m long fertiliser dust transfer feed conveyor
If you have rotating shafts breaking at the drive-end of the auger shaft you may have a combination of bending and torsional fatigue. You are welcome to read the series of emails and responses below to a screw conveyor auger drive end failure.
Dear Larry
Thank you for your data request for breast implant data and apologies for the delay in responding. The data available is:
My colleagues have been copied into this email to show your request has been actioned. I hope this is helpful. [Read more…]
In the last edition of R for Engineering, we learned how to draw small multiple plots in R and harness the power of comparison. We went from a busy graph to being able to use ggplot’s faceting functions to create a small multiples plot. If you need a recap, here’s a link to the last edition.
That is to say, nature’s laws are causal; they reveal themselves by comparison and difference, and they operate at every multi-variate space-time point.
– Edward Tufte
Small multiples have many uses in engineering, but the one I personally use them the most for is characterization and diagnosis. In my line of work, which is quality engineering, the ability to diagnose problems in physical systems (both product and machine/process-related) is a critical skill, and I will go as far as to say that diagnosing problems is a critical skill in any engineering discipline.
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Risk management is an objective-focused concept. Risk professionals must, therefore, be a catalyst, an advocate, and trusted friend for driving superior organisational performance.
They must walk alongside executives, managers and staff to achieve organisational objectives by making better decisions under uncertainty, risk, and opportunities.
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To increase reliability, you need to decrease the chances of failure occurring. Each chance of failure creates risk. Operating risk can be mitigated and managed by meeting all 15 Precision Maintenance excellence targets.
This list of precision maintenance excellence targets is how to ensure component parts, and the equipment they are in, always operate with optimal reliability. Each requirement must be met to the highest standard. By doing this your equipment and machinery are operating with the least microstructure stress possible and getting utmost reliability.
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Did you know that early FMEA standards did not include recommendations to reduce risk? They limited the analysis to the technical risk, without making specific recommendations. The first time I am aware of that an FMEA standard added a column called “Recommended Actions” was in 1993. Thankfully, it is common practice today to include Recommended Actions in FMEAs.
But what makes for excellent Recommended Actions and what is their role in an FMEA? We’ll begin with the fundamentals.