Accendo Reliability

Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site

All articles listed in reverse chronological order.

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Introduction to Design for Reliability

Introduction to Design for Reliability

Chapter 7 Design for Reliability of the book Practical Reliability Engineering starts with:

The reliability of a product is strongly influenced by decisions made during the design process.

The key message here is reliability occurs at the point of decision. Each time someone makes a decision, selects a component, chooses a material, assumes a use profile, the eventual product reliability takes shape.

Design for Reliability, DfR, is about making good decisions across the organization concerning reliability. [Read more…]

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When Management Doesn’t Listen

When Management Doesn’t Listen

A Bloomberg articles details the Takata airbag recall series of events. The line that caught my attention is:

…company documents suggesting that Takata executives discounted concerns from their own employees and hid the potential danger…

“Sixty Million Car Bombs: Inside Takata’s Airbag Crisis”, Susan Berfield, et.al. Bloomberg Business Week, posted June 2nd, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-06-02/sixty-million-car-bombs-inside-takata-s-air-bag-crisis

There are other examples where management doesn’t seem to listen when engineers raise concerns. Have we cried wolf too often? Has management gotten used to taken risks as a good business practice?

At times reliability risks are real and need to be clearly communicated. Let’s talk about how you can effectively get the message across. [Read more…]

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RCM Leaders and Followers

RCM Leaders and Followers

Funny how times change.

When I first began speaking at conferences in 1999 some of the statements I made regarding how to most effectively manage a Reliability Centered Maintenance program were publically criticized by practitioners of other methodologies.

Sixteen years later it seems that those who were at first critical of RCM Blitz® seem to have adopted nearly every change I made to make RCM easier to Manage, Facilitate and provide a return on investment (ROI) for the time it takes to train people, perform the analysis, implement the results, and perform the RCM tasks. [Read more…]

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Managing Failures Before They Occur

Managing Failures Before They Occur

Welcome to part eight of my 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance.

To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles, I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital intensive industry.

Uptime Insights Part Eight:

Asset Reliability

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…]

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5 Days to a Reliability Culture

What you can do to foster a reliability culture at your operation

Reliability culture is like clockwork
© William Warby

Improving reliability is easier said than done.

Often times you can develop great PM routines, improve equipment and have the right processes in place, but reliability doesn’t improve. Why is that?

It all comes down to people. People are the heart of reliability, whether they run the equipment or maintain it.

Changing people’s perception of reliability can be a very difficult task. So where do we start?

When trying to implement such change, you will often hear of change management and change framework.

This is a great exercise and contributes greatly to success. But what if you are a Maintenance Supervisor who needs a tangible action that you can run with? [Read more…]

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Unconscious Risk Management

Unconscious Risk Management

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

While we look at risk-based decisions and making decisions under uncertainty, these approaches all have one basic assumption – that the participants in these processes are doing so consciously, with eyes open and with an appreciation of the risks and consequences involved. [Read more…]

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Siegel-Tukey Test for Differences in Scale

Siegel-Tukey Test for Differences in Scale

There are a few different reasons we explore differences in scale.

Keep in mind that the scale of a dataset is basically the spread of the data. For most datasets, we’re examining the variance.

Hypothesis tests comparing means vary depending on the assumption of equal variances. Thus testing that assumption requires methods to adequately test the homogeneity of variances. The F-test should come to mind as it is a common approach.

Some datasets do not lend themselves to using the F-test, which is applicable using real numbers. Some datasets gather information that is ordinal or interval data, thus we need another approach to test for differences in scale. [Read more…]

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The Variety of Statistical Tools

The Variety of Statistical Tools

The Variety of Statistical Tools to Support Your Decision Making

My wife and I moved to a new home last year. We have yet to organize our tools.

The bedroom and kitchen are now organized. We, for the most part, can find the sweater or pan that we’re seeking.

No so for our tools in the shop. We have an assortment of hand tools for painting, home maintenance, yard work, and woodworking. In our previous home, we had the tools on pegboards, on shelves, in cabinets. We could find the right tool for the job at hand quickly. We’ve avoided the tool aisle at the hardware store recently, as we were sure we had the tool we need in the jumbled mess in our garage already. Still haven’t found it, though.

Have you noticed the number of statistical tools available? It’s like visiting a well-stocked tool store. There are basic tools like trend charting and advanced tools like proportional hazard models. Let’s explore the available tools a little so you can quickly find the right tool for the question or problem you are facing today. [Read more…]

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Support Systems Improve Efficiency

Support Systems Improve Efficiency

Welcome to part seven of my 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance.

To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles, I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital intensive industry.

Uptime Insights Part Seven:

Support Systems Improve Efficiency

Computerized systems are important and now seemingly indispensable tools for business.  Just remember the last power failure you experienced and you’ll understand.

There isn’t much that isn’t computerized these days.  Technology and its business applications continue to grow and proliferate.  The world of maintenance is no exception.

Most maintenance work is not computerized, but it is complex and managing it requires sophisticated tools. Using those tools effectively will improve the efficiency with which you deliver maintenance services.

Use them poorly and you only add cost. [Read more…]

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Do You Make This Critical Mistake? Find Out If You Are Contributing to Reactivity

Do You Make This Critical Mistake? Find Out If You Are Contributing to Reactivity

What is the one thing that all operations have? If you guessed a breakdown hero or fire fighter, you are correct.

You know the person who swoops in like Superman and repairs a machine quickly. These breakdown heroes are the people who reduce the time to repair, but do they contribute to or reduce the reactivity of the site? [Read more…]

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Never Purchase a Retired Rental Car

Never Purchase a Retired Rental Car

If you look around you day to day you can see a lot of examples of reliability testing.

When you are at the hardware store and looking at new power tools, notice which have broken switches, triggers, handles.  Many of us often just think it’s a defective one.  But it’s not.  It’s the weakest model of the bunch.

If all the models were put on display at similar times they have all been going through life cycle testing.  Every person that walks by picks it up and pulls the trigger, flips the switches bangs it around a bit.

It’s getting its life cycle testing done right in front of you. The one with the broken features is the model with the shortest life.  [Read more…]

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World Has Limited Resources..Is Intelligence One of Them?

World Has Limited Resources..Is Intelligence One of Them?

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

It has been suggested that Stone Age man had a higher IQ than today’s modern homo sapiens.

“That cannot be,” says the modern man, but if one thinks about such an assault on our modern-day ego and self-confessed superiority, the alleged ‘primitive’ man was able to survive in extreme conditions, traveled the planet and set the foundations for today’s societies. [Read more…]