All articles listed in reverse chronological order.

Overview of Presentations Skills

Presentation Skills for Reliability Engineers

We often present proposals and reports. We talk about the plan or results. We want funding, approval, or action. We need excellent presentation skills.

Excellent communication skills is often on job openings. It is not there by chance. Your ability to communicate well, especially via presentations is vital for your success and the success of your reliability program.

If your team, peers, or management do not understand your proposal or report when you present, few will take the time to read the material instead. Your presentation skills provide the incentive for action from your audience. Action you can guide using your presentation skills. [Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette 1 Comment

The 6 Things Every Maintenance & Reliability Program Needs To Achieve Sustained Results

I want my customers to be successful, every one of them. Yet there are times I can see the writing on the wall and I know as hard as I might try to show them a clear path to what it takes to be successful they have their own plan. Some of them are so complex that people become confused just trying to make sense of them, and others get so hung up in the minutiae of even the simplest of steps like listing a 3 part failure mode they will word-smith themselves to a point where folks just give up. I find myself asking “why do people have to make what is really so simple into something that appears to be complex?” [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

How Equipment Fails, Understanding the 6 Failure Patterns

Knowing How Equipment Fails Allows Effective Plans to Be Put In Place and Improve Equipment Reliability

Identifying How Equipment Fails

In the 1960s the failure rate of jet aircraft was high even with the extensive maintenance programs that were put in place to prevent the failures. The programs required overhauls, rebuilds and detailed inspections which required the various components to be disassembled. All of these activities were based on an estimated save life of the equipment. [Read more…]

by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Uptime: Managing Failures Before They Occur

Being proactive with your assets is all about managing failures before they occur. You can reduce or eliminate the consequences of failure by forecasting what is likely to happen and deciding in advance about what to do about it. The advantage to doing this is that major business impact due to equipment breakdown can be avoided. High performing companies manage proactively – they foresee and avoid problems. It’s good for business! [Read more…]

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment

Correctly categorizing a root caused failure is everything

You have been put in charge of a program to study failure rates of brake pads. The place to start is a testing program that will generate data for analysis.

Testing programs should begin with a specific intent. This may be to characterize quality based failures, use life, or wear-out failure modes. When a test is complete it is easy to take all observed failures and use them in the data set to characterize the failure mode. This is a mistake.

Each of the study intents I described above can be attributed to wanting to understand a specific section of the life curve that is commonly represented by the “bathtub” curve. [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Personal Risk and Big Data

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

I usually write about risk as related to projects, but several of the comments I received on my article on “Can Your Pacemaker be Hacked” made me realize that we are all faced with risk management in our personal lives.

Continuing on the medical topic, think about how many options you’re faced with when your doctor recommends a procedure, whether adding a pacemaker, replacing a joint or a prescription drug.

Hopefully you have a doctor that you trust and knows you, but how would you respond to the doctor recommending a procedure? If we use a risk process then we’d have to consider the possibility of the identified risk occurring, the impact on our life(style), the benefits of mitigating the risk.

To support our decision we could get a second opinion, do on-line research or check with family/friends that have had the same procedure. Then just like a manager assigning a risk we’d have to review the data we collected and make a decision. The advent of Electronic Medical Records should make life easier, but also lead to more challenges for managing/securing data. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini 1 Comment

Fibreglass Construction and Repair

Fibreglass construction and repair. Fibreglass is a glass fibre reinforced plastic composite with excellent chemical resistance properties. Its physical properties, selection of resins and glass, method of construction and fabrication and peculiar repair requirements must be appreciated when using this material.

Keywords: laminate, backing layer, structural layer, corrosion barrier, crack repair, winding angle. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

Electromigration Accelerated Life Testing

Black’s Equation

Black’s equation for estimating the time to failure due to electromigration is a classic. James Black explored and wrote about electromigration in aluminum metallization within semiconductors since 1969.

He and others have explored other materials used as conductors prone to electromigration. Thus, there are a number of models and constants available to match your particular system.

Let’s take a look at the general equation for a microcircuit conductor after a brief description of the failure mechanisms called electromigration. [Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

The 5 Worst Inventions Ever!

Something to Make You Smile on a Monday!

Something light to read on a Monday afternoon.

I’m beginning think that one of the worst side effects of growing older has nothing to do with the fact that you are not as active as you should be, but that you spend that time where you should have been walking, running, riding a bike or chasing the kids thinking about crap that might have little significance to the rest of the world. [Read more…]

by nomtbf Leave a Comment

Book Review: Accelerated Testing

Accelerated Testing: Statistical Models, Test Plans, and Data Analyses by Wayne Nelson

Published by John Wiley & Sons in 1990 this 601 page book started my career in reliability engineering.

I didn’t know it at the time in the early ‘90s, yet my assigned task to create an accelerated test for a new product would spark an interest in cheating time. Wayne’s book helped make that first accelerated test successful.

The Accelerated Testing book is a compendium of different ways to conduct accelerate tests with a focus on the planning the test and analyzing the data. Wayne is a reliability statistician, and as he will tell you, not an engineer. Thus the book tends to focus on the math.

What I enjoy about the book is the math is not the dry academic derivation driven material, it is full of examples and immediately useful formulas. There is just enough explanation to help the math wonks pursue their interest, and enough practical information to allow engineers to develop and conduct meaningful experiments. [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

3 Ways to Improve Profitability with a Criticality Analysis

Making the criticality analysis work for you and drive improvements in the maintenance strategy

Most manufacturers do not have an up to date criticality analysis and those that do have one, do not use it to drive decisions. Having a criticality analysis facilitates improved decision making and prioritization within the site and business.

How many times are there debates regarding which work needs to be done, which PMs will be dropped from the schedule because the planned downtime was reduced? These debates occur regularly, but to not have to occur. A criticality analysis drives improvements in the business by: [Read more…]

by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Capital Asset Management: Setup part 3

What is added to the capital investment?

Your upfront capital investment must go beyond engineering, procurement and building costs. Additional activities that will need to be done that fit within the 2 – 3 % of capital cost figure are:

RCM analysis on the new design (preferably at both concept and detailed design phases so you can incorporate design change recommendations easily) [Read more…]

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment

Design of Experiments, Testing Compression and the Opportunity to Identify Interactions

Design of Experiments (DOE) is a phenomenal way to identify key relationships between variables and effects. It fully leverages statistics to not only identify these relationships in a compressed time frame but any “interactions” between variables that cause a specific effect. These interactions would not have been observed if experimentation was limited to adjusted one factor at a time (OFAT).

[Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Could Your Pacemaker be Hacked?

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

Hack a pacemaker? Is this a real problem?

Some recent experiments have been able to hack a pacemaker and other medical devices including an insulin pump. The weakness of these systems was the analog sensors attached to the body to gather information. These analog inputs bypass the internal security and are converted directly to digital signals.

From a risk perspective is this something medical device manufacturers , insurance companies and the medical professionals need to worry about? It was part of a conversation at the Black Hat @Design West Conference where considerable discussion was held on building defensive walls. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

How to Trick Operators (and everyone else)

What readers will learn in this article.

Operators cannot second-guess plant designer’s intent.
The plant designer is responsible of successful plant
operation.
Operators need true indications of plant conditions to
make the right decisions.
Select and locate sensors that provide foolproof
indication of plant operational status.

[Read more…]