Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
All articles listed in reverse chronological order.
Failure modes and their causes can be detected in service, like tire pressure monitors on your vehicle. Is that what is assessed in the Detection column of the FMEA? This article discusses detection risk, including examples, and answers this question.
A gear pump uses two meshing, toothed cogs to force water from the inlet of the pump through to the outlet. Figure No. 1 shows a simplified drawing of an external teeth gear pump on the left along with the alternate arrangement of internally pointing teeth. [Read more…]
In previous articles we defined an element of lean as a phase and gate structure for new product development. This assumes a waterfall approach to the project (versus agile product development).
A new product life cycle phase gate structure might entail, for example: “Definition, Concept, Design, Verification, Qualification, Production and End-of-Life”. (Your organization might decide on different phase names.)
There’s an apparent contradiction in using a waterfall project approach and calling it lean project management, however. A goal of any lean process is to work toward ‘single piece’ or continuous flow: agile product development is more like ‘single piece flow’ of information, versus waterfall which is more like ‘batch processing’ of information.
Iideytinnfg pantrtes in dtaa is why we pforrem stsiattaicl aalisnys. It is not an ecaxt sicncee but iarmitofonn can be exeaaltpotrd eevn if the dtaa is nsoiy or inmptcolee.
The Rseaon Wuleibl asaynlis is ieeeptmnlmd as a tool is to look for pntertas and tehn cetare a charisotairceatn of a cmomon boeihvar. Taht 
charcoeatistairn can tehn be uesd to unsretadnd uocnpimg silimar pntarets. The raoesn you hvae been albe to raed tihs alirtce is beusace yuor biran fgriued out taht eevn tuhogh teh wodrs are samerbcld the frsit and lsat leettr and the wrod lgnteh areare corcert.
Uisng tihs prttean and the sceentne coxnett and rninaemig ltrtees and cmipanrog taht asnaigt yuor vbualrcaoy you can qulikcy dremtinee the menanig of the sectnnee.
It’s spimly a mteatr of aniaslys, pteratn chractrsaoietian, and tehn precdoitin by aiplnypg taht chariocatestrian to a new dtaa set.
Wlel Dnoe !
-Aadm
As I work with teams of operators and skilled trades people performing RCM analyses at companies around the world at some point in time as we are discussing the failure modes and effects I might ask the question; how does your company ensure that the skilled trades people working on your assets are actually qualified to work on the equipment?
This question is often met with a look of confusion. [Read more…]
An Elusive Product Life Time DefinitionThe following note and question appear in my email the other day. I had given the definition of reliability quite a bit of thought, yet have not really thought too much about a definition of ‘product life time’.
So after answering Najib’s question I thought it may make a good conversation starter here. Give it a quite read, and add how you would answer the questions Najib poses. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Joseph Paris (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Nobody likes to fail. Failing causes us embarrassment. Failing bruises our ego. Failing might be a dark spot on our performance assessments. All we have to do is reflect on our childhood for when we failed and how poorly we felt. Even if our parents did give us encouragement, we still felt bad about failing. Let’s face it – failing sucks. [Read more…]
The focus of maintenance has changed from repairing equipment to keeping it running for longer between breakdowns. This requires more consideration of how to get longer running life between repairs, i.e. higher reliability, on a machine. To accomplish this a number of ‘tools’ have been invented and developed to allow maintainers to pinpoint problems and fix them. In this article three of the most effective ‘tools’ will be introduced. Root cause analysis, Weibull analysis and lifecycle simulation can be used to help organisations achieve proactive approaches to maintenance or adopt a “reliability based approach” to maintenance. [Read more…]
When looking at a pile of data, sometimes there is a data point that is not like the others. It attracts attention as it is different than the rest of the data.
When I spot something odd in a dataset, I wonder if there is something to learn here. Is this an opportunity to make a discovery or improve a process?
All too often it is tempting to remove the outlier as a mistake. Or to drop the outlier as it doesn’t make any sense and ‘messes up’ the analysis. [Read more…]
My last article covered a scalable model for lean product development depending on the number of projects and technical objectives.
Let’s start with the foundational elements from this model:
In this article, I answer one engineer’s questions regarding how to squash his nerves with a job offer negotiation. His question specifically asks about salary negotiation. However, as you’ll read in tip #6 below, it is better to focus on the whole package and consider other aspects of the offer that might be more important to you. [Read more…]
The challenges of keeping reliability at the resource and schedule negotiating table mid-program can be greatly helped by a solid effort to connect it to the business case when the product program is created.
It’s the ambiguity of how reliability makes the company money that makes the case in live negotiation so difficult. Everyone knows that reliability affects sales, marketing, warranty expense, future development. But how do you compare that to the urgency of time to market or cost point? If you, as the reliability representative, can point to a specific quantitative connection made to the business case for the product you have one.
I had a conference call this morning with some potential clients in regard to rolling out a RCM Blitz™ effort. The sad thing about Reliability Centered Maintenance is the reputation the tool has acquired over the last 40 years has one of two faces.
The sad, tragic and more popular face is that if the Resource Consuming Monster. The reputation that RCM is too detailed, that it takes too long, and that by the time you finish your analysis there are no recourses and there is no money left for implementation. According to a survey conducted on ReliabilityWeb.com nearly 70% of all RCM implementations fail, with statistics like this, it is a wonder the tool still exists. [Read more…]
See www.jsaprograms.com for innovation in hazard control.
Doing a job safely is no accident! Like all good outcomes safety is a result of good planning. As the Chinese philosopher Confucius said, “In all things success depends on previous preparation and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.” If you want safe work it needs to be planned as part of the job.
The other important fact about safety is that it is a personal responsibility. It is up to you to do the job safely. There is not a manager or supervisor in the world that wants to go to prison or be fined for a death or maiming because of his negligence. That means people in-charge want jobs done safely too. All they ask is that the safety procedures and practices used on the job be the least that are adequate while still meeting all the safety issues. [Read more…]
Guest Post by John Ayers (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Eloquence has many definitions primarily applied to speaking and writing. One definition is the art or practice of using fluent, forceful, and persuasive discourse. Over the ages, authors have variously described eloquence as “words sweetly placed and modestly directed” (William Shakespeare), “a painting of thought” (Blaise Pascal), “the poetry of prose” (William Cullen Bryant), “the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy” (Ralph Waldo Emerson), and “the art of clothing the thought in apt, significant and sounding words” (John Dryden).
I think many of these words describing eloquence can also be applied to product design. Some examples and rational are presented below. [Read more…]