Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
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…]
“Dave is the guy we call when we need to get the plant up and running again; there really isn’t anything he can’t fix.”
Dave sits back in his chair, he looks down and while he is smiling I can see he is slightly embarrassed by the praise his manager is heaping on him.
It’s clear to me that he is not comfortable sitting in this conference room with a group of people that includes his manager, supervisor, and two engineers who are here to kick off their first RCM analysis. I have just begun asking the group to introduce themselves; Dave followed his manager and the two engineers in the room who each rattled off where they attended college, what their degrees they earned, the areas of the plant they are responsible for, their hobbies outside of work and some banter regarding the upcoming college football season.
Then it was Dave’s turn. [Read more…]
Welcome to the final blog in my 10-part series 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.
Whenever you are following a set of steps to achieve some goal you are following a process.
Your people do their jobs through day to day implementation of those processes in order to deliver results. If the processes are ill-conceived or inefficient things move slowly and results are more expensive to obtain than they need to be.
Well designed, efficient processes that integrate with other related business processes keep things running smoothly, costs down and help to keep people motivated. [Read more…]
Building on the Dale Carnegie® Principles from the famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, we can progress to the next set of principles.
Using his key principles as a guide, we can bring about change within our organization. In the previous post, we covered how to build authentic and meaningful relationships.
If you have not read that post, yet, please go back and do so before reading on.
I was part way through my Dale Carnegie® course when I was challenged to make a change at work by using one or two of the principles below.
We were struggling with being able to complete our weekly PMs because we had to support the production line changeovers. Dwelling on this, I approached the skilled trades that were preparing to perform a changeover. I asked them about the changeover, and what were the sticking points.
I allowed them to do a great deal of the talking. I listened to the challenges they had and why the changeovers took so long. [Read more…]
Radar level detectors are becoming a popular technique for tank level detection of liquids.
The radar sends a sub-millionth of a second pulse from an emitter and the return signal is detected at a receiver.
The reflection’s time lapse is measured and electronically converted to a distance from the liquid surface. Installation peculiarities need to be understood and appreciated in order to provide a reliable operating set-up.
Keyword: antenna, spurious reflection, reference plane, emission cone. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Rod Farrar (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
The project management body of knowledge generally focuses on scope management, time management, and cost management. Risk management generally comes in at about 8th place out of the ten.
However, risk management is potentially the biggest part of the project management planning process. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Geary Sikich (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Exposure to threats, hazards, and risks leads to vulnerabilities that an organization must deal with.
Commonly these are addressed via a mitigation process. Once mitigation is accomplished, often times the organization feels that the risk, threat, hazard does not need to be revisited. However, as a result of the mitigation efforts on the part of the organization, the risks, threats, hazards reconfigure and re-emerge in a different form.
In order for mitigation to be successful, it has to be a constant and ongoing process that produces a resilience to the negative effects of risks, threats, and hazards that are realized. [Read more…]
Creating a reliable product that meets customer expectations is risky.
What is risk and how does one go about managing risk? The recent set of ISO standard updates elevates risk management.
A starting place is a definition. [Read more…]
This type of reliability may have different names. A quick search of a few references in my library and I didn’t find ongoing reliability testing, ORT, in any of them.
It does exist and you may have heard of it before or even use some form of ORT. Or not.
Ongoing reliability testing or ORT is the continued evaluation of your product typically using samples drawn from production. The testing evaluates the reliability performance of recent production units.
The focus is on finding anomalies or changes that may occur in the design, supply chain, or production process that significantly changes field reliability performance. [Read more…]
A few months back, I wrote a blog resulting from a conversation I had with a group of Maintenance Technicians who were attending the International Maintenance Conference (IMC) in 2011.
While the group was enjoying the conference and learning some new things, the general consensus was that they felt they would not be able to apply the tools and techniques they were learning because “management will say they support reliability, but when it comes right down to it, talk is cheap.” [Read more…]
DFMEA’s definitely have a bad reputation as exercises that consume an enormous amount of time and unfortunately yield little value to the program.
And can be miserable to experience.
A quote from a customer “We aren’t going to do any more DFMEA’s because we feel a bit traumatized by the last round.”
I have also seen DFMEA’s be a cornerstone to a design program using its resources with surgical precision to improve the product.
I started to think about the differences between the ineffective and effective DFMEA’s. Here are some of the steps that I believe make the “good ones” GOOD. [Read more…]
Welcome to part nine 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.
There’s an old saying that, “two heads are better than one”.
Teamwork has been proven time and again to produce superior results. It is the basis for many successful methods like RCM, PMO, RCFA, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and various quality improvement programs like Six Sigma.
The importance of your people has already been stressed part 2.
Choosing excellence goes beyond that – the use of self-organized teams brings the best out of your people, delivers enhanced productivity and superior results. [Read more…]
