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All articles listed in reverse chronological order.

by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Capital Asset Management: Setup — part 1

Capital Asset Management: Setup — part 1

Plan to Get Capital Asset Management Right

This is the first of a three part series.

Except for a few industries where mistakes can have high costs in terms of human life or massive environmental impact most of us do a poor job of setting ourselves up for success. We build or acquire new capital assets making little or no provision for spare parts, training of maintainers and operators in new skills and knowledge. Most of us do a very poor job of providing technical documentation to the support disciplines – project engineering often simply files whatever it has gathered and often in a file scheme tied to contractor contract numbers rather than using the asset hierarchy that everyone else will use in one form or another. Commissioning activities rarely push the new assets hard enough – they ramp up slowly, almost gingerly, because so few really know much about how it all should work. They are unprepared for any semblance of normal operations. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Conscious Asset Tagged With: asset-management, planning

by nomtbf Leave a Comment

A Life Data Analysis Challenge

A Life Data Analysis Challenge

old machinery couplingHere is a Challenge: Life Data Analysis

Some years ago a few colleagues compared notes on results of a Weibull analysis. Interesting we all started with the same data and got different results.

After a recent article on the many ways to accomplish data analysis, Larry mentioned that all one needs is shipments and returns to perform field data analysis.

This got me thinking: What are our common methods and sets of results when we perform life data analysis? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, NoMTBF

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

Is Your Maintenance Program Aligned With The Business?

Providing the right level of service to production will ensure the profitability of the business.

25. graphicUsing a Business Needs Analysis will ensure that your maintenance program is on the same page as the goals of the business. Often times the two are not aligned, which leads to excess costs for the business, reducing the ability to be profitable. For example, does your operation require 99.9% reliability? It would be nice but that level of reliability is extremely difficult & costly to achieve. Think of the various industries that require that level of performance.   NASA, the Armed Forces, Nuclear Power, etc. require 99.9% reliability and to achieve so, the effort in design and in operation is extremely intensive. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance and Reliability, on Maintenance Reliability Tagged With: Business Goals, Business Needs, maintenance, Maintenance Program

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Using Risk and Safety Analysis as Part of the Requirements Process

Using Risk and Safety Analysis as Part of the Requirements Process

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

Frequently in my work as a systems engineer I’m faced with producing several artifacts for a project, typically a system architecture, model(s), requirements, safety analysis and risk analysis (management plan).

The challenge is many of these are treated as serial activities, items to be completed but not necessarily tied together.  To produce an architecture and requirements that reflect all of the known/identified issues we should be working on all of these activities concurrently or at the least have a first cut at the safety and risk analysis before starting the requirements.  From a project planning stand-point how these are shown on a schedule are driven by the size of the team and the project schedule.  “What do we need to complete a phase/gate review”  is how the schedule ends up being built versus what do we need to proceed with the systems design and architecture. [Read more…]

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

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Angular Contact Bearings

Angular Contact Bearings

They are used on shafts that encounter axial forces or combined loads (both axial and radial forces). Examples are centrifugal and helical rotor pump shafts and helical and worm gear shafts in gearboxes. Their design only permits axial forces in one direction. For alternating axial loads they must be installed as a bearing set to accommodated the forces from both directions. When set back to back, and less so when set face to face, they act to stiffen the shaft and handle larger bending moments such as overhung components or high midpoint shaft loading.

Keywords: floating bearing, preload, clearance, tolerance. [Read more…]

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

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Time Compression Accelerated Life Testing

Time Compression Accelerated Life Testing

The Easy One

The easiest ALT is one that you operate an item more often then operated by the customer. Removing spans of time the item is not being bent, moved, heated, etc allows you to use time compression.

For example, a home kitchen toaster may be used for a few cycles during breakfast time in your home. In the lab, we can avoid having to wait the day of idle time and just make toast more often than just at breakfast to accelerate the operation of a toaster.

Time compression ALT is also easy to understand and describe the acceleration factor to cover the ALT results to field use conditions. Let’s explore a simple example, work out the acceleration factor and how to interpret a set of ALT results. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Preparation Notes, Reliability Testing Tagged With: Accelerated life tests, Reliability test planning

by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

Culture Changes Begins With Your Ability To Influence Change

Culture Changes Begins With Your Ability To Influence Change

I got a call from an old friend a few weeks ago; he had started a job with a new company a couple of years ago in what he thought was a position of influence and two years later he was questioning his decision to accept this position. “I think I have used up the time your given to influence change, when I first got here people were excited about the new focus on reliability but every time I try to get some money to get things started I hit a road block. I’ve got no money for training, no money for tools or equipment, and no money for consulting but my bosses still expect to see change.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, RCM Blitz

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Soft Skills For Reliability Engineers

Soft Skills For Reliability Engineers

The Hard Part is often Soft Skills

There are many paths to becoming a reliability engineer.

If you are good with statistics, enjoy the detective work of failure analysis, or simply want to create a durable long lasting product, you likely found yourself in a reliability engineering role.

A science or engineering background is a great start. Time spent working with a design or maintenance team certainly help. An advanced degree in reliability engineering is another path.

The element that is often missing as a precursor become starting a career in reliability is excellent soft skills. We know the engineering and science stuff. The formulas, the testing, the data analysis. We can get stuff done in the lab or on the shop floor.

Yet to become an exceptional reliability engineer, or any type of engineer, add the ability to communicate well. Add the ability to get your point across and to wield influence to help others understand and accept your proposals, ideas, and results. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Musings on Reliability and Maintenance Topics, on Product Reliability Tagged With: Presentations Skills, soft skills

by nomtbf Leave a Comment

10 Reasons to Avoid MTBF

10 Reasons to Avoid MTBF

“Why do you avoid MTBF?”

I got this question the other day. The person knew about the NoMTBF campaign. They didn’t quite understand why it was a big deal, especially for me, to avoid MTBF.

The tiff between MTBF and myself is not personal. The metric has not been a part of my work or caused any significant problems for me personally.

It has caused problems that have caused problems for my enjoyment of products and systems though. It has lead to poor decisions by many organizations that create items I and you use on a regular basis.

We can do better than to settle with the use of MTBF in our own work or in the work of those around us. Here are 10 reasons I recommend you avoid using MTBF.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, NoMTBF

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

A Smarter Way of Preventative Maintenance

A Smarter Way of Preventative Maintenance

4 Simple Steps to Improving Profitability through Smart PMs

How did the PM routines come to be in your business? PM routines are often the result of a failure and the maintenance department being told to implement a PM to prevent it from happening again. The PM is hastily put in place without much detail or thought. Fast forward a little ways in time and soon you have a monster of PM program, in which you struggle to execute on time. Overtime increases to complete all of the PMs, yet the performance of the operation does not improve. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Maintenance and Reliability, on Maintenance Reliability Tagged With: Preventative Maintenance

by Greg Hutchins 2 Comments

Requirements Development and Risk Management

Requirements Development and Risk Management

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

One of the keys to a successful project is having a set of requirements that are well defined and stable. We’ve all worked on projects where a lack of defined and controlled requirements has led to scope creep which result in schedule delays.  

The requirements development process must also include mitigations for the risks identified in the Risk Management Plan. To accomplish this the initial risk assessment must be completed before the requirements development process begins. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CERM® Risk Insights, on Risk & Safety Tagged With: Paul Kostek, Requirements Development, Risk, risk management

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Confined Space Entry Safety

Confined Space Entry Safety

A confined space is anywhere not normally meant for human habitation in which access maybe restricted and the conditions in the confinement may be inadequate to support life or could cause engulfment. Obvious places are tanks, vessels, silos and below ground pits. The less obvious ones are cold rooms, areas of plant sandwiched between machinery and equipment, tip truck trays and open pit mines.

Keywords: risk assessment, hazard identification, job safety analysis, safe atmosphere.  [Read more…]

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

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment

Making the Connection

Making the Connection

Why do so few product development programs make that connection between the product specification document content and the released product? It seems to be such a common thing that these two don’t connect that organizations don’t even bother to review or analyze this after release.

The mindset at that point seems to be:

  • We did the best we could with the resources we had
  • All product change from their original specifications
  • It transformed into a product that better fits our updated understanding of what could be made to satisfy the market

[Read more…]

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

by Fred Schenkelberg 7 Comments

4 Different Types of Reliability Testing

4 Different Types of Reliability Testing

Getting the Right Information from Your Reliability Testing

You cannot test in reliability any more than you can test in quality. Often reliability testing is done though, and knowing the range of testing approaches and their associated results will help you get the most information from each test conducted.

Let’s explore the types of testing that generate information useful as you develop a reliable product. There are 4 different types of reliability testing:

  1. Discovery
  2. Life
  3. Environmental
  4. Regulatory

Within each type there are many variations to the testing details and the specific results generated. Understanding the questions each type of testing has the capability to resolve is a good first step to implementing the right set of tests for your project. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Preparation Notes, Reliability Testing Tagged With: Environmental Testing, Highly Accelerated Life Test, Life Test, Reliability test planning, Reliability Testing, tests

by Kevin Stewart Leave a Comment

Characteristic 1 of an RCA Program

Characteristic 1 of an RCA Program

Committed Sponsor

As with other programs, an RCA program needs to be driven from the top and supported through all levels of the organization. This includes upper management, supervision or mid-management, and those on the front line doing the [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, Reliability Reflections Tagged With: RCA program

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