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All articles listed in reverse chronological order.

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Reliability Engineering is About Answering 3 Questions

Reliability Engineering is About Answering 3 Questions

Engineers solve problems. We optimize solutions.

Engineering starts with a question. The work of engineering is answering those questions. Can we create an antenna with enough range? How can we make a safe autonomous driving car? How much can a delivery drone carry if it has a range of 100 miles?

Reliability engineers are no different. We ask questions and work to answer them. To solve the problems in the pursuit of providing our customers reliable solutions.

In general, there are only a few types of questions a reliability engineer addresses: What will fail, when, and what is the impact of a failure.

The answers are used to design reliable products, optimize supply chains and assembly processes, refine warranty accruals, and identify significant business risks. [Read more…]

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Understanding FMEA Severity Risk – Part 2

Understanding FMEA Severity Risk – Part 2

Problems and Solutions

Is action always required on high-severity issues? What if severity is high (9 or 10 on a severity scale of 1 to 10), and the occurrence and detection rankings are both low? Is action still required? This problem, as well as a challenging problem involving fail-safe strategies, are the subject of this problem-solution article.

[Read more…]

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Enabling Customer Value in Product Design

Enabling Customer Value in Product Design

Use an Integrated Approach in the Product Life Cycle Process to Enable Customer Value

Given our primary goal of developing a profitable product, our objective in the design process is to maximize customer value and minimize cost.  From a financial analysis standpoint: we pursue products with the highest possible margins (ie. charge the customer “as much” as possible, and make the product for “as little” as possible).  Of course we also want to sell “as many” as possible. [Read more…]

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How Accounting Policies Affect Maintenance Costs

How Accounting Policies Affect Maintenance Costs

Accounting decisions can greatly affect maintenance costs. Two examples are the decision to purchase items as maintenance or capital and plant item asset numbering.

Maintenance costs are expensed in the financial year incurred and are claimed as a tax deduction at the company tax rate (soon 30% in Australia) in the year they are spent. Capital expenditure, on the other hand, is depreciated and can only be claimed as a tax deduction over the usable life of the equipment. Depending on the industry, the depreciation rate for industrial equipment is 20% per year. It can be as little as 2.5% per year for office buildings. There is a clear tax advantage to claim as much expenditure as possible as a maintenance cost and not a capital cost.  [Read more…]

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Exploiting New Challenges in Enterprise Risk Management

Exploiting New Challenges in Enterprise Risk Management

Heightened Awareness or Reactive, Backwards Looking?

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

From financial crises to energy catastrophes to earthquakes and threats of terrorism, we hear a lot about events that challenge our ability to identify and manage risk.  Unfortunately, some of the things that emerge from many of these events are reactive regulatory rules and requirements. [Read more…]

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The 1 Parameter Exponential Distribution 7 Formulas

The 1 Parameter Exponential Distribution 7 Formulas

This is part of a short series on the common life data distributions.

The Exponential distribution is popular and useful in isolated situations. It has some nice features and flexibility that support it’s popularity. This short article focuses on 7 formulas of the Exponential Distribution.

If you want to know more about fitting a set of data to a distribution, well that is in another article.

It has the essential formulas that you may find useful when answering specific questions. Knowing a distribution’s set of parameters does provide, along with the right formulas, a quick means to answer a wide range of reliability related questions. [Read more…]

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5 Tips to Ace the Interview

5 Tips to Ace the Interview

5 Body Prep Tips to Ace the Interview

Even a seasoned professional gets a little nervous (or a lot nervous!) before an interview.  It is human nature.  Luckily for you, there are lots of things that you can do to prepare to boost your confidence and ready yourself.  Now, I am not talking about wearing a great suit, studying your material, practicing your Ten Second Tease elevator speech, or rehearsing your Me at My Best Stories.  Yes, those are all important things to do.   [Read more…]

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10 Things a Maintenance Tech Can Do Today to Improve Reliability

10 Things a Maintenance Tech Can Do Today to Improve Reliability

As companies around the globe look to improve equipment reliability, I can’t help but think of the Technicians and Craftspeople I meet after conference presentations. As they step up to introduce themselves to comment on the presentation, these attendees will often say, “I really liked your presentation, but I don’t think our management would ever support a program like this. What you are doing makes a lot of sense, but we just don’t have the people and our Operations Managers don’t understand maintenance and reliability.” [Read more…]

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She’s a Menace!

She’s a Menace!

The Titanic had two sister ships, the Britannic and the Olympic. There was a woman called Violet Jessop, a nurse and a cruise liner stewardess that worked on all three. (That’s her, to the right->)

  1. The Olympic crashed into a warship whilst leaving harbor but was able to make it back.
  2. She was on the Titanic as it sank and is referenced in the Titanic film, a stewardess that was told to set an example to the non english speaking passengers as the ship sank. She looked after a baby on lifeboat 16 until being rescued by the Carpathia the next day.
  3. It’s not known what exactly caused the sinking of the Britannic but the lifeboats hit the water too early. As the ship sank, the rear listed up and a number of the lifeboats were sucked into the propellers. Violet had to jump out of the lifeboat she was in and sustained a serious head injury, but survived.

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The Army Memo to Stop Using Mil HDBK 217

The Army Memo to Stop Using Mil HDBK 217

The Army Memo to Stop Using Mil HDBK 217

Over 20 years ago the Assistant Secretary of the Army directed the Army to not use MIL HBK 217 in a request for proposals, even for guidance. Exceptions, by waiver only.

217 is still around and routinely called out. That is a lot of waivers.

Why is 217 and other parts count database prediction packages still in use? Let’s explore the memo a bit more, plus ponder what is maintaining the popularity of 217 and ilk. [Read more…]

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Understanding FMEA Severity Risk – Part 1

Understanding FMEA Severity Risk – Part 1

The Seriousness of Consequences

Have you ever been in an FMEA meeting where the team did not agree on the severity rating? Understanding and correctly applying severity risk is an important part of FMEA application. This article discusses the subject of severity risk, including examples for design and process FMEAs, and offers a tip on what to do when the team does not agree on the severity risk rating.

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
Henry Ford

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Enabling People, Processes and Product Development

Enabling People, Processes and Product Development

Clear roles and responsibilities for project managers and team leaders can significantly improve alignment of skillsets and overall teamwork

A generally accepted principle for a successful business is great people, processes & products. This can be further simplified as “maximizing customer value and minimizing cost” of the product.

Consider the following:

  • An excellent product development process should ensure maximum customer value while product cost is minimized
  • Process improvement minimizes (or reduces) costs across the enterprise
  • Project management ensures execution of product development, or process improvement products

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Defeat Your Lizard Brain and Banish Procrastination Forever

Defeat Your Lizard Brain and Banish Procrastination Forever

Do you sometimes (or often) suffer guilt or frustration due to procrastination? If so, you are not alone. It’s a common perception that procrastination is an inherent personality flaw, the result of laziness or other slothfulness. People get frustrated by procrastinators and label them as lazy, untrustworthy, and unreliable.

However, in recent decades scientists have learned a lot about how our brains work that gives insight into procrastination and why it happens. It turns out that when your advanced human brain sets out to accomplish a task, but can’t see a clear path to completion, the doubting antiquated lizard brain takes over. Your lizard brain, a leftover instinct-driven antique from the days of the caveman, decides the apparently unsolvable is overwhelming, and creates a bad attitude toward the task. It’s fight or flight, and procrastination is the flight response to the stress created by the task. [Read more…]