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All articles listed in reverse chronological order.

by Perry Parendo Leave a Comment

Design Of Experiments In Industrial Testing and How It Relates To Your Business

Design Of Experiments In Industrial Testing and How It Relates To Your Business

Movement in Design of Experiments Testing

Historically, it has been relatively easy to meet customer system requirements using basic testing techniques. Today, however, customers require faster changes in technology and requirements are getting more difficult to meet. Competitive cost pressures have made the achievement of goals an even tougher task. In some cases, customers have requested and in a few cases mandated tools for companies to “be more efficient and organized in testing”. These facts create the need for organized and effective testing methods to be incorporated in all phases of the development process. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Experimental Design for NPD, on Tools & Techniques Tagged With: DOE

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

Root Cause Analysis: The Key To Breaking The Reactive Cycle

Root Cause Analysis: The Key To Breaking The Reactive Cycle

Addressing The Root Cause Of Failures Will Unlock The Potential Of The Business

You walk into the plant on Monday morning.  You are immediately confront by the production manager stating “Press 201 is down.  The mechanics are saying it is the clutch again.”  You feel an overwhelming sense disbelief.  You ran overtime last weekend and replaced clutch at a cost of $30,000.   How is it the clutch is failing again?

This scenario may sound familiar.  It happens all the time, across many different industries and plants.  So what exactly happened?  The root cause was not properly diagnosed, and the clutch was replaced.   Based on the short life of the new clutch, the root cause was likely something else that is affecting the clutch. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance and Reliability, on Maintenance Reliability Tagged With: root cause, Root Cause Analysis

by Adam Bahret 1 Comment

Software Design For Reliability

Software Design For Reliability

With all the complaints you hear about products rebooting and software crashing, do companies really practice Software Reliability? In fact, there are some companies that do, but they are mostly in the industries that require products to have high availability, such as telecom, defense, and space, or safety-averse industries, such as medical and industrial plant operation. Most other industries don’t pay as much attention to it. The best method to increase Software Reliability without significant increases to schedules or budgets is to use a Software Design for Reliability (SDFR) approach.  These are the key steps. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Apex Ridge, Articles, on Product Reliability Tagged With: analysis

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Retaining Knowledge to Reduce Risks

Retaining Knowledge to Reduce Risks

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

Mens Sana in Corpore Sano (A Sound Mind in a Sound Body).

It could also be translated that quality of life is more important than the span of life, the number of years you live.

Or that medicine’s task is not to add years to your life but the life to your years.

And it might also be that such a formula for life – originally a Juvenal’s wish or prayer – is much more ancient than its Latin transcription. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CERM® Risk Insights, on Risk & Safety Tagged With: Risk

by Mike Sondalini 2 Comments

Stress in Metals

Stress in Metals

What readers will learn in this article.

  • Explanation of stress and strain.
  • How metals yield and deform under stress.
  • What happens at the molecular level in metals under stress.
  • Methods to minimise stress concentrations.

Too much stress in metal will cause it to fail. Failure can occur by putting the metal under a once-only load greater than it can take or by continually loading the metal cyclically with a high load less than the breaking load (metal fatigue). [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance Tagged With: Metal

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

8 New Topics in the ASQ CRE Body of Knowledge

8 New Topics in the ASQ CRE Body of Knowledge

Last week we reviewed the 10+ topics removed from the CRE body of knowledge (BoK). This week, let’s look at the additions.

Three of the additions are new categories or groups of topics that in part contain new topics. There are five new topics, that in most cases included bits and pieces of concepts buried in the previous BoK.

Let’s take a look at each additions in a bit more detail. Some I agree with, some I wonder what the motivation is behind the addition, and some I question why it is included. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Prep, CRE Preparation Notes

by Anne Meixner Leave a Comment

Analog Specs Just Test Them!

Analog Specs Just Test Them!

In the beginning– just test the specs.

Analog circuits have been around a long time. Consider a simple LRC circuit– the inputs and outputs are continuous wave forms.

This remains a key differentiator from digital circuits which operate on 1’s and 0’s.

Continuous waveforms require different test equipment and test techniques. Analog circuits have properties of impedance, 3Db points in the frequency domain, transform functions. They can be treated like a lumped circuit or a distributed circuit in which signal integrity and transmission line theory apply.

So testing is easy- you just test the specs. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, Testing 1 2 3 Tagged With: Analog Test, Mastery 1

by Dennis Craggs 1 Comment

A Short Primer on Residual Analysis

A Short Primer on Residual Analysis

How to Do Residual Analysis to Check Your Statistical Models

The analysis of residuals helps to guide the analyst when analyzing data. It provides a way to select the model, analyze the data, develop parameter estimates, and to develop confidence in the results. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Big Data & Analytics, on Tools & Techniques Tagged With: Regression Analysis

by Perry Parendo Leave a Comment

A Useful Tool to Understand a System

A Useful Tool to Understand a System

A Definition of Design of Experiments

Perry defines Design of Experiments with one simple statement.

“A tool to assist in the process of understanding a system.”

Just 2 minutes and 10 second long, lets break down and understand each phrase in this basic definition of design of experiments. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Experimental Design for NPD, on Tools & Techniques Tagged With: DOE

by Christopher Jackson Leave a Comment

Red Flags and Autonomous System Safety

Red Flags and Autonomous System Safety

and the importance of looking back before looking forward

Have we gone through the introduction of autonomous vehicles before? In other words, have we gone through the introduction of a new, potentially hazardous but wonderfully promising technology?

Of course we have. Many times. And we make many of the same mistakes each time.

When the first automobiles were introduced in the 1800s, mild legislative hysteria ensued. A flurry of ‘red flag’ traffic acts were passed in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Many of these acts required self-propelled locomotives to have at least three people operating them, travel no greater than four miles per hour, and have someone (on foot) carry a red flag around 60 yards in front. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Product Reliability, Reliability in Emerging Technology

by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

10 Things I Wish I Knew Before Entering The Working World

10 Things I Wish I Knew Before Entering The Working World

When I entered the working world in February of 1981 I was ready to set the world on fire, I had been hired into an apprentice program at Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York and while some would recognize this as an entry level position, I was determined to make a difference in how this company operated its business. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, RCM Blitz

by nomtbf Leave a Comment

How Did Reliabilty Become Confused with MTBF?

How Did Reliabilty Become Confused with MTBF?

When Asking for Reliability Information Do You Ask for MTBF?

Our customers, suppliers, and peers seem to confuse reliability information with MTBF. Why is that?

Is it a convenient shorthand? Maybe I’m the one confused, may those asking or expecting MTBF really want to use an inverse of a failure rate. Maybe they are not interested in reliability.

MTBF is in military standards. It is in textbooks and journals and component data sheets. MTBF is prevalent.

If one wants to use an inverse simple average to represent the information desired, maybe I have been asking for the wrong information. Given the number of references and formulas using MTBF, from availability to spares stocking, maybe asking for MTBF is because it is necessary for all these other uses. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, NoMTBF Tagged With: understanding

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

Guarantee Your Performance with Basic Care

When you hear the term basic care, what comes to mind?

I remember hearing a story of a brand new packaging line that was installed.  It operated at high OEE, delivering significant improvements over the old line.  Within 6 weeks, the line was running worse than the original one.   Finger pointing ensued, the OEM saying it was how it was maintained.  With the manufacturer saying it was a poor design.

A few weeks later, a prominent government official was scheduled to visit the site to officially open the new line.   The site was shut down and all the equipment was thoroughly cleaned.  The line started up and ran just as well as it did when it was first installed.  This story highlights the importance of having clean equipment, and the impact it can have on an operation.  This is where Basic Care comes in. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance and Reliability, on Maintenance Reliability

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment

Old Requirements Making a Come Back in Future Endevours

Old Requirements Making a Come Back in Future Endevours

The original windmills of Europe are feats of engineering.  I was able to get inside of a few in Holland and see all the mechanisms that have been operating for hundreds of years.  I was lucky that the wind was strong and the windmills had their sails out the days I was visiting.  A few were grinding flax seed and others designed to pump water from a low basin toIMG_5885 a high basin to control basin water levels. Being inside of the windmill was like being an insect inside of a grandfather clock.  It was so interesting seeing how they engineered the mechanisms to optimize the balance of the system needs in such a different manner than we do with many of our currently engineered products. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Apex Ridge, Articles, on Product Reliability

by Greg Hutchins 2 Comments

Why Don’t We Listen?

Why Don’t We Listen?

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

Or, why we are not listened to?

Why don’t we listen to those who – justifiably – cry wolf?

Be others or ourselves, it does not matter.

The output of this regrettable way of thinking often results in a “chronicle of a death foretold”.  What do I mean? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CERM® Risk Insights, on Risk & Safety Tagged With: Risk

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