Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
All articles listed in reverse chronological order.
If you can’t sell all you can produce, then reducing costs is often the only way to improve margins, but that simplistic accounting perspective is not always the case.
Cost control is often thought to be key to attaining profitability but it the case of maintenance it can get you into trouble.
Cost control can have a big opportunity cost if you don’t take advantage of the opportunities you have. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Geary Sikich (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
I was supposed to be in Boston presenting at “The Disaster Conferences” on 28 January 2015. Well, the weather just put us out to 19 March 2015 for the now rescheduled Boston conference.
I guess that they are still feeling the effects of this week’s blizzard, now named “Juno”; that left Boston with over 24 inches of snow.
According to the Weather Channel Winter Storm Juno pounded locations from Long Island to New England with heavy snow, high winds, and coastal flooding late Monday into Tuesday. The storm is now winding down.
The National Weather Service has dropped all winter storm and blizzard warnings for Juno. [Read more…]
Here are the things to watch out for when you need to fabricate platforms and walkways.
Stairs, walkways, platforms, and ladders are required to be made to the Australian Standard AS 1657-1992. This standard specifies the design requirements and the materials of construction to be used.
Keywords: deflection, allowable load, live load, guard rails, connections, treads. [Read more…]
The term variance is a statistical concept related to the spread or dispersion of a set of data. Second to the mean, it a common value we may calculate.
We find standard deviation easier to understand and use (it uses the same units as the data) whereas variance uses the units squared.
We use variance in quite a few different ways. Let’s review just a few. [Read more…]
Recently there was a power outage, that caused approximately 2,000 homes to lose power during a very cold day. The paper headline read, “All-day outage caused by worn wiring”.
This seems like a reasonable comment and probably like many other newspaper headlines also seems to go a long way to explain what caused the 2,000 homes and business to lose power for 5 ½ hours, and the 300 that lost power for a total of 11 ½ hours. [Read more…]
Today article is one of those off-topic things I just felt compelled to write about. It also has a bit of the sarcasm us New Yorkers are famous for, but I’m betting the other business travelers will be able to relate!
With my work comes travel and in the last 15 years, I have seen a fair amount of the world.
Let me rephrase that, I have seen a fair amount of the world’s airports, hotels, manufacturing facilities, and restaurants.
Along the way, I have met some very good people, learned a whole lot about how different products are made or produced and discovered for myself that no matter where you live, where you grew up, or what you do, everyone still wants the simple things in life: a secure job, a roof over their head, and to be afforded the time to both provide for and enjoy raising a family. [Read more…]
Finding solutions is reliability engineering too.
Have you noticed that finding solutions often requires just the right question, the proper framing of the issue, the query that reveals the problem and solution?
One of the best ways to lead a team and provide a focus on reliability performance is to ask the right questions.
Understanding objectives, risks, and failures is what we primarily do as reliability professionals. We work with teams to achieve or improve reliability performance.
We ask questions. [Read more…]
Conventional consulting approaches begin with assessments to determine your current state of affairs, judge what’s good and bad about it, give it a score, provide a long list of recommendations and then build an improvement strategy based on the outcome.
Strategy development is normally carried out by a select leadership team and then the change is rolled out to lower levels in the organization. This approach has served well for a long time and it is at the outset of almost any major consulting engagement.
It is useful when comparing sites among each other, but is there some sort of award for being best? Usually not. [Read more…]
Building on the Dale Carnegie® Principles from the famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, we can progress to the final set of principles.
Using his key principles as a guide, we can bring about change within our organization.
In the first post, we covered how to build authentic and meaningful relationships. In the second post, we covered how to win people to your way of thinking. In this last post, we will cover what it means to be a leader.
If you haven’t read the previous posts, I strongly suggest that you do, as they build on each other. [Read more…]
Written with assistance from Ben Karel of Fusion Engineering Plastics
Pty Ltd. Unit 1, 7 Dobra Rd, Yangebup WA ph (08) 9494 1004
Welding can join thermoplastic parts together. It can be by melting the surfaces and pressing them together or by extrusion welding with a filler rod.
Several methods of welding are available. Proper manual techniques are critical to success as is the pressure testing of pressure parts.
Keywords: electro-fusion, butt welding, electro-socket welding, hot air gun, melt temperature. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Ed Perkins (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
In the 1960’s Ralph Nader became famous by writing an expose’ of the Corvair, a rear-engined Chevy built by General Motors.
He called it “Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile “[1][2]. He accused car makers of ignoring safety, resisting providing seat belts and other design issues that contributed to injuries in accidents.
In 1966 the U.S. Congress passed the Highway Safety Act (aka National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act), which created mandatory federal safety standards for motor vehicles and established what is now the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. [Read more…]
The world of risk management has a unique set of risk terminology.
Your ability to incorporate reliability concerns into risk discussions hinges on understanding the terms in use.
Let’s explore a few terms and how they relate to reliability engineering. [Read more…]
We all probably know Fred’s fight against the use of “MTBF” as a default measure of reliability.
And I concur. “MTBF” offers the least insight to product reliability. It offers little to the user in terms of realizing the benefits of reliability.
However, we all would like to see products that deliver more appealing benefits; and reliability is a key factor. But reliability is only part of the equation.
Technical performance is important.
So is price. So is appearance. So is delivery. So is the customer: different customers may see the world differently. And so may your competitors.
So, we can’t all adopt the same measurement for reliability. [Read more…]
Occasionally, I like to step back and reflect on reliability in basic terms.
In that spirit, the basic premise of reliability is usually stated as “The probability that an item will perform a required function, without failure, under stated conditions, for a stated period of time.”
To use the reliability equation, the definition of failure must be defined, so you can tell if your equipment has indeed failed. This way you can include it in the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) calculation.
After you have defined a failure and recorded them appropriately, you can plug the numbers into the reliability equation, R = e ^-(λ*t) where λ is the failure rate which is defined as λ= 1/MTBF and come up with an objective value for the reliability. [Read more…]
Reliability goals or objectives are just a starting point.
You goals represent your target at one point in time.
At best they represent what your customers expect for reliability performance at one point in time.
When goals are set well, they anticipate what your customer expects when they receive your product. In a perfect world, you customer will find the reliability performance just a bit better than expected.
It’s not a perfect world. [Read more…]