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Resilience, Resolve, and Reliable Products

Resilience, Resolve, and Reliable Products

The essence of creating a reliable product involves making informed decisions. Informed related to the implications of the various options on reliability performance. Yet, these decisions, made nearly every day during the early stages of a product’s lifecycle are fraught with uncertainty.

There is an approach that instead of making perfect decisions every time, we instead focus on making decisions that allow us and others to learn the necessary information to then make better decisions. [Read more…]

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Relational contracting – a breath of fresh air or something that has always been blowing in the wind?

Relational contracting – a breath of fresh air or something that has always been blowing in the wind?

a breath of fresh air or something that has always been blowing in the wind?

Let’s just say you owned a house with a garden so big that you need someone to look after it for you. So, you find a professional gardener. And (because you have just graduated from a contract management course), you ask your gardener to sign a ‘traditional contract.’

A ‘traditional contract’ means (at least in this post) a contract with hundreds of clauses supposed to cover every possible future scenario. Do you host garden parties and want your gardener to spend 8 hours on your garden in the preceding week? There needs to be a clause for that. What happens if the gardener is sick? What happens if you don’t want the gardener in your garden between 2pm and 4 pm on Tuesdays because you have clarinet practice? What happens if your clarinet practice changes? What if you have 3 feet of snow? What flowers do you want planted in the spring? Our ‘traditional contract’ needs clauses for every scenario. [Read more…]

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The Keys to a High Reliability Organization: Priority, Proaction & Focus

The Keys to a High Reliability Organization: Priority, Proaction & Focus

RCA has an image problem and needs a public relations agent to reshape its reputation in the healthcare industry! RCA is primarily viewed as a reactive tool. This perception is how we have been conditioned by various regulatory agencies that require us to do RCA under very specific circumstances (usually when something very bad has occurred). When such ‘Sentinel Events’ occur, then we pull the microscope out to take a deeper look using our respective RCA tools. Under this use, RCA is viewed as a ‘Money-Taker’ because it appears only to consume people’s time and resources when they already feel they are overloaded. Rarely is the CEO asking for an ROI associated with an RCA. [Read more…]

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Optimizing Your Storeroom

Using a Kaizen Approach to Improve Your Storeroom

game plan
game plan

No storeroom is perfect, well at least of those I have seen.  The process of improving is never ending.  A common term for this process of continuous improvement is Kaizen.   The Kaizen activity is often seen on the plant floor, either the form of a blitz, in which a tremendous amount of resources are thrown at an issue or an area.  The other is a systematic approach, in which a small amount of improvement is achieved each day. [Read more…]

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Coronavirus: Assessing Risk and Planning Initiatives

Coronavirus: Assessing Risk and Planning Initiatives

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

Coronavirus seems to be spreading quicker than previous pandemic potential viruses, i.e., H5N1, H7N1, SARS, Ebola, MERS, etc.  Could this be the long awaited/anticipated threat realization, or is it becoming a media driven phenomenon?  Needless to say, planners should be implementing some assessment analysis regarding the potential for impacting business operations.  Here is a brief look back at one of my articles from 2006, entitled, “Pre-Pandemic Planning: Business Continuity Perspectives“, when Bird Flu (H5N1) was the hot topic:

The business community is “not adequately prepared” for a possible avian flu pandemic, says Secretary of Health & Human Services Michael Leavitt.  As of July 24, 2006, there have been 231 confirmed cases in humans resulting in 133 deaths (a mortality rate of 57%).  The virus has spread to 33 countries through wild migratory birds that have now infected domestic poultry (source World Organization for Animal Health). [Read more…]

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Motivation for Structured Experimentation

Motivation for Structured Experimentation

When planning and designing an experiment, it may be tempting to try and accomplish all the objectives is a single experiment.  The thinking is often that experimentation is time consuming and expensive, so one experiment must be better than multiple experiments.

However, in general, it is a good idea to plan for multiple experiments which often is a much more efficient approach.  We like to think of experimentation as a methodology that is best implemented in phases.  We define experimental phases as: [Read more…]

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Firestone Tire Reliability Circa Year 2000

Firestone Tire Reliability Circa Year 2000

My wife and I were in Firestone-Walker Brewery (Buellton, California) after Solvang Danish Days. (That’s me playing in the Solvang Village band.) My wife was comparing an Adam Firestone photo on the wall with a man at a table. I was admiring a woman seated near the bar with balletic posture. The balletic woman picked up a pizza and delivered it to the man and sat with him. My wife went over and asked the man if he was Adam Firestone? He was, with his sister Polly. While my wife chatted with them, I did not engage, because I was responsible for FORD recalling the Firestone tire sizes that Firestone did NOT recall. [Read more…]

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How do I set up my reliability engineering career?

How do I set up my reliability engineering career?

One of the enduring beauties and mysteries of reliability engineering is that there is no straight forward definition of who a reliability engineer is. Proactive, successful organizations, employ reliability engineers in many different and tailored ways. Reactive, ‘barely solvent’ organizations use reliability engineers as over-qualified auditors, expected to clap system configurations through design review gates as quickly and quietly as possible.

So what does this mean for you and your reliability engineering career? Are you in a position now that you are not entirely happy with? Are you in an industry on a downward trend … meaning that sooner or later you need to move to a greener pasture? Or do you want to become a better version of yourself and feel more valued than you currently do? [Read more…]

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What Are the Root Causes of Ineffective Communication?- A Healthcare Case Study

What Are the Root Causes of Ineffective Communication?- A Healthcare Case Study

We hear about ‘poor communication’ so often related to undesirable outcomes, that the term has become somewhat generic in nature. It has become meaningless in terms of implementing corrective action plans to prevent the risk of further miscommunication. How can we act on ‘poor communications’ without understanding what causes such miscommunication? This article will focus on applying key RCA principles to understanding what causes miscommunication. [Read more…]

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Assessing Your Storeroom

The first step to improving the spare parts and storeroom process

Assessment.jpgKnowing what the best practices are in a storeroom or spare parts management process is not enough.  The best practices need to implemented, and typically it can’t just be implemented right away.  The level of resources, the ability of people to change all prevents the immediate implementation.  In addition, not every organization will be at the same starting point or want to go to the same level of maturity.  This is where an assessment comes in. [Read more…]

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The Observer Effect Unveiled

The Observer Effect Unveiled

Researchers in psychology and other social sciences have long been aware of the observer effect—a phenomenon that occurs when the subject of a study alters their behavior because they are aware of the observer’s presence. Researchers typically design their experiments to reduce or eliminate this effect to avoid skewing the results of the study. Beyond the realm of research, though, an understanding of the observer effect and its applications is valuable wherever people’s actions are being evaluated. [Read more…]

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COVID 19: Blame is for God and Small Children

COVID 19: Blame is for God and Small Children

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

Unless you are a person that firmly believes there will be a second wave – or even that there might be a second wave –  the reactions and measures taken to the COVID-19 pandemic are starting to calm down and the world is beginning to unwind the measures that have been put in place; albeit to varying degrees and velocities and with little consistency.

On thing is for certain; this event will be studied for years to come as data is gathered, scrubbed, and harmonized so that proper analysis can take place.  Unfortunately, another thing which is as certain is that the analysis will be politicized – with, unfortunately, a priority of placing blame being a primary driver of the analysis and the outcomes.

But it would be wise to remember; “Blame is for God and small children” – Dustin Hoffman as Louis Dega in the movie “Papillon”. [Read more…]