Articles

Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.

The Specialist

I was in a meeting recently with a customer team. It was on-site with 12 people ranging from mid-level engineers to upper management. Someone defended me earlier in the meeting by saying “Well, he did write a book on it!” Which was nice and kinda cool to hear someone say. But this lead to a later comeback by a crusty, principle engineer, 40 years under his belt, boat captain from “Jaws” kind of guy. “If we can buy your book then why do we need you?”

I took a moment. I knew that not responding wasn’t what I wanted to do but had to tread carefully because a poorly crafted response could easily sound arrogant. This is what I responded with… [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 3 Comments

4 Steps to Accomplish HALT

4 Not Always Easy Steps

Highly Accelerated Life Testing, HALT, is a method to discover the weaknesses in a design. Using a step stress approach of single and combined stresses, you can quickly expose the salient weaknesses in your design and/or assembly process.

The value of HALT is it’s quick and often finds problems not previously known. You will destroy one or more prototypes, yet the value of knowing specifically what needs improvement more than justifies the sacrifice of a few photos.

Conducting HALT may be part of your reliability plan. Keeping a few steps in mind will help make sure your HALT does provide value back to your development efforts. [Read more…]

by Dennis Craggs 6 Comments

Telematics Counting Data Analysis

In my prior article, an overview of vehicle telematics was provided. Telematics data includes time stamped records and fields containing count or parametric data recorded from the vehicle CAN bus. The count data is always a non-negative integer and the parametric data is stored as real numbers, generally in scientific format. This article focuses on the analysis of counting data.

Count data is used to monitor events, i.e., the number of trips, the days of operation, the calendar date, door open/close cycles, the number of engine starts/stops, or other variables. So, if a variable is selected for analysis, how can it be analyzed and a vehicle be characterized? How can fleets be analyzed? Can vehicle usage percentiles be determined?
[Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

Guest Post: Why Soft Skills Are the Hardest Skills to Acquire

A Guest Post by Kay Sandberg, Christopher Harding, and Will Wilkinson of Luminary Communications

Remember that first time you were asked to step into a leadership or management role, or to manage a client relationship? The experience was probably exciting and unsettling at the same time. Something different was asked of you.

While many of us have succeeded as individual contributors or team members, succeeding as a leader or manager requires a new set of skills we have often not been given the opportunity to acquire. This applies whether we carry an official leadership responsibility or not. In a future article it would be interesting to explore the distinction between “leader” and “manager”. [Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

The 5 Fatal Mistakes of Customer Service

You would think that anyone who provides a product or service would understand the value of a satisfied customer.

Satisfied customers come back for more, they spread your name around with their friends and colleagues and talk about you in that bright eyed way a teenager talks about their first love. While it would be fantastic if this feeling of mutual admiration could last a lifetime, the reality is in the service and consulting business the average relationship between a customer and a client is somewhere between 5 and 7 years. [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic 2 Comments

Leading & Lagging KPIs, What Is The Difference?

Using Leading & Lagging KPIs Can Make The Difference In Driving Performance, By Allowing You To See Into The Future.

This is the second part of a mini series on Key Performance Indicators. If you haven’t already please read the first post of this series on KPIs.

KPIs are often used to measure the past performance of a process, but did you know that they can be used to see into the future and predict the performance of the organization?

KPIs can be used to measure past performance, or predict future performance. This is because there is a cause and effect relationship between leading and lagging KPIs. When a process is measured, it will in turn effect another process which is also being measured, providing insight to future performance. [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Cascade Effect Thinking — Disruptive Paradigm Shifting

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

If Knowledge is Power, then understanding the cascading factors that shape our destiny can potentially offer Disruptive Knowledge and Decisive Power. Cascade Effect Thinking (CET) is a new paradigm that dynamically discovers the truth about interacting threats and opportunities in unique, analytical and gamified ways. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Magnetic Flow Meters

Mag-flow meters are used to measure the flow velocity of conductive liquids. In a magnetic flow meter an electromagnet placed either side of the bore creates a magnetic field when the power is turned on. As the conducting liquid flows through the magnetic field a voltage is developed across the liquid. Insulated electrodes flush mounted in the wall of the meter detect the voltage. The magnitude of the induced voltage is proportional to the liquid velocity, the length of the meter and the strength of the magnetic field.

Keywords: electric current, isolation flanges, calibration. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Taguchi Design of Experiments Approach

Dr. Taguchi was an engineer, not a statistician. He considered the ability of design of experiments (DOE) to identify and reduce sources of variability, yet needed a system that did not require a statistician to implement.

Dr. Taguchi proposed a few considerations for those applying the Taguchi design of experiments approach. [Read more…]

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment

Months or Miles?

We are all familiar with the base of our car warranties being in both months and miles. Some of that is that they want a definitive end to all warranty periods. But another reason is you can’t just boil down all aging factors to one stress. In a product development program, we are always under pressure to keep all activities as short as possible. Accelerated Life Testing ALT can loose almost all of it’s value when not executed with care. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Using rain-flow counting methods for process wear out studies

Guest Post Prepared by Eugene Danneman, Wind Wear LLC

Introduction

Analyzing and visualizing data that is related to equipment wear-out (fatigue stage) over a specific time span is a challenge. Analyzing systems, equipment and components exposed to spectrum loading as opposed to uniform cyclical loading that span years or decades or centuries requires a special approach. Think of roads, bridges and other assets with long life spans that are susceptible to wear out mechanisms caused by external and internal loads, varying load durations, temperature swings and corrosion. [Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

10 Things A Reliability Engineer Can Do Today To Improve Reliability

20 years ago, I began my first assignment as a Reliability Engineer at Eastman Kodak’s Photo Chemical facility in Rochester, New York. Now, I understand that I just lost several people who began reading this article by using the words “photo” and “chemical” in the same sentence, but 20 years ago, most photography was still a chemical process.

When I started in this job, the position of Reliability Engineer was a new thing to our company. As a result, I got little direction regarding what a Reliability Engineer should or could do to improve reliability in the area I was assigned. 20 years later, I would like to share a list of the 10 things any Reliability Engineer can do to improve reliability at their site. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

Taguchi’s 3 Fundamental Concepts

Taguchi may be best known for the variation of design of experiments that bear his name. Yet the impact of his work is felt across the product life cycle and all of the quality field.

Building on Deming’s observations that 85% of poor quality is due to faulty processes and only 15% due to the worker, Taguchi focused on creating robust processes.

A robust system is one that tolerates the daily and seasonal variations of the environment, machine wear, and equipment part-to-part variation, etc. A robust system operating in the range of real world conditions. [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

What Is A Key Performance Indicator (KPI)?

Identifying the Right KPI for Your Business is Critical to Managing the Performance of the Business (Part 1)

“What gets measured, gets done” and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are critical to measuring the performance of the organization and business. So what specifically is a KPI? According to the The Professionals Guide To Maintenance And Reliability Terminology, a KPI is a vital indicator which is used to evaluate process performance. KPIs are used to represents a measure (or set of metrics) focusing on those aspects of organizational performance that are the most critical for the current and future success of the organization. [Read more…]

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment