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Qualitative Assessments: 3 Bad Examples That Will Improve Your Effectiveness

Qualitative Assessments: 3 Bad Examples That Will Improve Your Effectiveness

Opinion-based data is the foundation of qualitative assessments. 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. This article provides three examples of poor qualitative analysis to avoid and, in turn, improve the effectiveness of your work.

Qualitative Assessment Scales

Likert scales are five-point ordinal scales where participants select a label (or numerical value) that equates to an opinion or attitude. Labels are paired (i.e., agree-disagree, strongly agree-strongly disagree) symmetrically around a neutral center. Today, we see 5-, 7-, and 9-point versions of Likert scales in everything from customer surveys to risk assessments.

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Getting Started

Getting Started

If this is your first time reading my newsletter: I am thrilled that you decided to give it try!

If this is not your first time: I’m glad you’re still here!

We’ve got a few things to go through in this week’s edition.

However, before we get into the cool stuff, that is showcasing useful functionality and interesting use cases, I feel it would behoove me to lay down some of the foundational things you’ll need to do to get you started in R, should you be interested.

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Screw Conveyor Auger Shaft Mid-Point Breaks

Screw Conveyor Auger Shaft Mid-Point Breaks

Are your screw feeder and trough screw conveyor auger shafts snapping in half?

Analysis of a broken screw feeder shaft on a granular Copper Sulphate Bagging Hopper Feed Screw explains how stress cause shaft failure

If you have rotating shafts breaking at the centre of the span then you quite likely have a metal fatigue problem. Take a read of the report below.

The 316L stainless steel screw feeder shaft on a 3200mm long, 260mm diameter, 1:1 pitch flight screw broke in the middle. The shaft was 50mm Schedule 40 316L stainless steel pipe. The screw flight was 6mm thick 316L plate stitch welded to the shaft. The screw had been replaced new only 4 weeks prior. The screw was removed from the trough in two pieces and the break was at the middle of the screw. The break was generally square to the shaft.

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Don’t Fear Disruption: Leverage It

Don’t Fear Disruption: Leverage It

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

I challenge you to read this paragraph and then close your eyes and focus. Think about the future. What does it look like to you? How do you think humankind operates 20, 30, or 40 years from now? Are we even more digitally connected than we already are? What behaviors or actions are commonplace now that might be nonexistent then?

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Unpacking Continuous Improvement Strategies

Unpacking Continuous Improvement Strategies

With U.S. annualized inflation rates exceeding 5.0% each month since May of 20211 – the longest stretch this century – the need for sustainable cost improvements has rarely been greater. And one source of cost reductions available to nearly every manufacturer is the elimination of waste and quality defects within their own facilities. Understanding the major continuous improvement (CI) strategies may help manufacturing leaders find a path toward lowering their costs and creating healthier margins for their organizations.

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Covariance of Renewal Process Reliability Function Estimates Without Life Data?

Covariance of Renewal Process Reliability Function Estimates Without Life Data?

Email from www.smartcorp.com advertised how to forecast inventory requirements using time-series analyses: single and double exponential smoothing, linear and simple moving average, and Winters models. SmartCorp compares alternative times-series forecasts in a “tournament” that picks the best forecast. Charles Smart says forecasting, “…particularly for low-demand items like service and spare parts — is especially difficult to predict with any accuracy.”

Time series forecasts also quantify variance. Excel’s time-series FORECAST() functions do exponential smoothing, account for seasonality and trend, and “pointwise” confidence intervals. Pointwise means only one confidence interval is valid at a time; not a confidence band on several forecasts!

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How I Stumbled Upon R

How I Stumbled Upon R

It all started two years ago. I had been in engineering, mostly in quality engineering, all my career, and at that point decided I would try and expand my analytical capabilities as an engineer. Not that I didn’t already have tools at my fingertips; I would use Excel, a lot. I was actually pretty good at it, having developed even custom applications with macros and all the bells and whistles. I had Minitab, which most engineers in my line of work also use. If it’s not Mintiab, then it is JMP or one of those statistical applications. They’re all fine.

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The Connection Between Equipment Risk and Equipment Reliability

The Connection Between Equipment Risk and Equipment Reliability

A slide deck of a presentation made by Mike at the SIRFRt WA Maintenance Roundtable November 2011.

Mike goes into depth with risk quantification, plotting techniques, along with connecting maintenance related risk to business risk levels. The presentation also explores using reliability as an element in the risk equation and discusses a few different ways to minimize risks.

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Project Leadership: Action or Damnation

Project Leadership: Action or Damnation

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

“You’ll be damned if you do and damned if you don’t”.  This was the message from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for those situations when you believe in your heart that you are doing the right thing even if, or when others believe it to be wrong.  This is what leaders do, they lead based upon what they believe to be right and will reap the consequences, whatever the outcome.  Leadership is about doing; it’s about making things happen through the people who follow and enabling those people to make it happen.  It’s also about being responsible for your actions and those of the others who have acted on your behalf.

Leadership has always been around in some form or another; there is always a leader of any pack or tribe.  Successful leaders and their idiosyncratic styles are not only analysed and biographed but also emulated and even imitated.  Practically speaking though it boils down to the ability of some to influence, motivate and direct teams of individuals to undertake some task or other.  The traits of leadership in turn are a function of a leader’s character and the situations in which they find themselves, the people around them, and the task at hand.

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Self-Discipline Part 2

Self-Discipline Part 2

Self-discipline can be broken into two portions: the will to get the actions turned into habits, and the ability to create incentives to keep the habits going, long after passion fades away.

The first thing we need to do is set some clear goals, which you can take from the personal development plan we created earlier. Next we’re going to look at the time audit we did where we broke everything into ten minute sections. We’re going to act like project managers for our days, and we’re going to micro-manage our time (to start) to make sure that our time we plan on investing in our goals is actually implemented.

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What Are Best Practices for Facilitating Qualitative Assessments?

What Are Best Practices for Facilitating Qualitative Assessments?

Opinion-based data is the foundation of qualitative assessments. 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. The article provides best practices for improving administering and facilitating qualitative assessments.

A Long History with Many Forms

The modern basis of opinion-based data’s scientific use can be traced from the western hemisphere to the late 1800s. Educators and psychologists were seeking to quantify their clinical observations of human behavior. A similar movement was underway in the fields of natural science and statistics.

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So, What’s Still Wrong with Maintenance

So, What’s Still Wrong with Maintenance

Enterprise Asset Management and Maintenance will Always be Spectacularly Unsuccessful at Delivering Failure-Free Equipment, Until you Change to an Equipment Wellness Paradigm

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The role of Maintenance is to eliminate operating equipment risks. Yet, organizations using Preventive and Predictive Maintenance strategies still have equipment breakdowns. They still have forced outages and stoppages. They consistently get emergency repairs. So, what makes today’s Maintenance paradigm so unsuccessful at equipment risk elimination? Because it is the wrong paradigm to use. The right mindset to have is an equipment wellness paradigm!

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