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Is Warranty Big Data?

Is Warranty Big Data?

 Vehicle Warranty Big Data

Automobile companies pay dealers to perform vehicle prep and make warranty repairs on customer vehicles. A lot of data is collected thus warranty is considered big data.

Generally, vehicle warranty covers 3 years or 36,000 miles. When a vehicle is serviced, the customer, vehicle, repair, and text data are collected. Claims are entered into a transaction database, may be rejected for a number of reasons, and then resubmitted until resolved. The transaction database covers many model years, millions of vehicles, and a number of warranty claims for each vehicle. As a rough estimate, assuming 10 years, 2 million vehicles/year, and 2 claims for each vehicle, yields 40 million records. The actual number is higher due to the submission, rejections, and resubmission cycle.

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Reliability Stakeholders

Reliability Stakeholders

Get to Know Your Realibility Stakeholders

Understanding the reliability stakeholders in an organization is an interesting exercise.

Who are they?

  • Executive management
  • Business unit
  • Sales
  • R&D
  • Quality
  • Manufacturing

It’s easy to look at each of those and say “They all could easily get by and appear successful even if a product has moderate to poor reliability”. You could also state that ” Reliability is a key factor to success in their role” [Read more…]

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The Recipe for RCM Success!

The Recipe for RCM Success!

RCM Implementations don’t fail, believe me if you understand what your getting into upfront, use a proven process to select your asset for analysis AND you commit the resources, your implementation will be a huge success.

Looking back 20 years I can clearly remember performing my first RCM analysis and the ordeal that followed as we struggled to:

a) See the value in the analysis we had just completed (Someone told us that RCM should be performed on every piece of equipment at our plant so we selected one of our most common assets.

b) Free up the resources necessary to implement the tasks that came out of the analysis. [Read more…]

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The Philosophy of Effective FMEAs – Part 2

The Philosophy of Effective FMEAs – Part 2

Stand Like a Rock
(Problems and Solutions)

What did American inventor and businessman Charles Kettering  mean when he said, “A problem well stated is a problem half-solved”? Framing the problem and pondering solutions can be enlightening, and a great way to learn. This article will pose three problems and offer solutions, as a way to learn by doing.

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
Confucius

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What is FMEA?

What is FMEA?

A Brief Overview

Should an FMEA result in design or manufacturing improvements? Should it ensure that tests discover the right problems? What are the objectives of FMEAs? Whether you are new to FMEA or an experienced practitioner, there is always something to learn. This is the first in a series of articles on FMEA that should expand the knowledge of every reader.

“Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.” ~ Henry Petroski

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Welcome to “Inside FMEA”

Welcome to “Inside FMEA”

New Insights on Achieving FMEA Excellence

Do you consider yourself new to FMEA, or are you an FMEA expert?

Or somewhere in between?

I’m a great believer that knowledge of any tool such as FMEA, is a lifelong journey. In the new series of articles called Inside FMEA, my intention is to bring to life the subject of FMEA, and provide value to readers from all levels of experience.

Each week I will publish a new article on Accendo. The topics will span the full range of FMEA applications, and offer guidance to real-world challenges that FMEA teams face each and every day. [Read more…]

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Run to Failure is a Viable Option

Train wreck
Image by Robyn Jay

How Allowing Equipment to Fail, Will Improve the Uptime in your Facility.

Often times the maintenance team is focused on preventing failures in the facility.  All failures need to be addressed and no failures are acceptable.   This mindset may be holding back the uptime in your facility.  How is this?  After all, if we strive to prevent all failures shouldn’t uptime improve?

Most organizations do not have the resources to prevent every single failure and as such, resources are often pulled from failure to failure.  When the organization focuses on the consequences of the failure, instead of the failure itself, it can free up the resources to improve reliability.   Once the consequences are understood, running equipment to failure becomes an option.  This allows the team to focus on preventing the failures that make a difference to the business. [Read more…]

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ISO 31000 Challenges

ISO 31000 Challenges

ISO 31000 is going to be used more often as more ISO certified companies adopt Risk Based Thinking.  However, ISO 31000 can be challenging.  Why?

Interestingly, the descriptive nature of the ISO 31000 standard may well be its strength, but may also be its weakness.  The standard without the proper guidance of a risk practitioner maybe come discretionary and even arbitrary.

ISO 9001:2015 has Risk Based Thinking requirements.  Note ISO 31000 was developed in 2009 and is not harmonized with the new annex SL standards and ISO 9001:2015. [Read more…]

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CRE BoK and Risk Management

CRE BoK and Risk Management

The New ASQ CRE BoK Group: Risk Management

The 2018 ASQ CRE Body of Knowledge has a new top-level section titled II. Risk Management.

A few of the topics, 6 of the 9, are the same or similar to topics in the previous CRE BoK. There are three new topics that extend the reliability engineers need to know, understand, and use risk management tools.

Overall the new section of Risk Management has three groups of topics:

A. Identification

B. Analysis

C. Mitigation

Let’s take a quick look at the details in this new section and highlight the changes and new elements. [Read more…]

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Stuck at Testing of Digital Combinational Logic—Part 2

Stuck at Testing of Digital Combinational Logic—Part 2

In the previous article you learned to apply the Stuck at Fault Model (S@) to a small combinational circuit.

You can take the learning on the Full 1-bit adder and apply it to larger combinational circuit.

In testing lingo, you often hear people refer to this as the testing of random logic. Technically, there’s nothing random about the logic.

I think “random” gets used to contrast with the highly structured design of memory circuits into array of 1-bit cells. Memory test lends itself to algorithmic testing, for example the Marching 1. In random logic testing you may use algorithms to propagate your faults, that is automatically develop a test pattern.

You need to keep in mind that the logic being tested has a functional purpose and this can be implemented in a multitude of ways. Let’s take a second look at the adder function. [Read more…]

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5 Sure Signs You’re Getting Old!

5 Sure Signs You’re Getting Old!

Just a bit of humor as we push to the end of another work week!

I turned 55 a few weeks back and just yesterday someone asked me how old I was. I had to stop for a minute to think and when I replied 55 the young Engineer who asked me the question sat back in his chair and said; “Wow! That means you have been working in the Reliability Engineering field like 35 years!  I can’t imagine the changes you have seen in your career!” [Read more…]