All articles listed in reverse chronological order.

Getting to Consensus

Getting to Consensus with the FMEA Team

“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”
Martin Luther King

One of the challenges for any team leader is bringing the team together and agreeing on decisions and actions going forward.

Consensus building is the best practice for all of the FMEA team decisions. This means the FMEA team takes the time to understand all sides of an issue and finds a solution or determines a course of action that is supported by all team members. Facilitating is a consensual activity.

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by Sanjeev Saraf Leave a Comment

Hurricane Risks: Flood Damage To Plant Equipment

It has been awhile since Ike…so I figured this would be an appropriate time to post on hurricane risks.

During a hurricane plant equipment can be damaged both by high winds and flooding. For example, the majority of plant equipment damage caused by Hurricane Rita (2005) was wind related, whereas more flood-related damage was reported during Hurricane Ike (2008).

Why Stainless Steel is Corrosion Resistant

Stainless steel is known for its corrosion resistance in many environments, with different alloys having different levels of corrosion resistance. Also, stainless steels are available with a wide range of strengths. Understanding the reasons for the corrosion resistance is helpful for selecting alloys based on the required strength and environment to which the steel will be exposed.

Utilizing CMMS/EAM for Defect Elimination

As we all have learned, eliminating defects is the key to a safe and profitable plant. But how do we know where our ‘bugs” are hiding? There are certainly many ways to uncover where the bugs are, but one place in particular is your computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) or enterprise asset management system (EAM), as it is commonly referred.

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Old Preventive Maintenance (PM) Out, New Preventive Maintenance (PvM) In

PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE STRATEGY IN A PLANT WELLNESS WAY EAM SYSTEM-OF-RELIABILITY

IN A PWW EAM SYSTEM-OF-RELIABILITY, PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE STRATEGY IS TO REPLACE PARTS WHEN EXCESSIVE STRESS BUILD-UPS IN THEIR MICRO-STRUCTURE

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by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Strategy Focused Management System Improves Performance

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

Organisations use different management systems to provide the required foundation to direct and control their activities to achieve their objectives.

When the organisational structure is complex, the organisation needs to develop a robust, practical, yet simplified, integrated management system. This strategy-focused integrated management system will fully integrate all relevant management practices and common touchpoints of the business into one coherent and synchronised management system. In doing so, it enables and drives the achievement of its corporate strategy and improve or drives performance.

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by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

What is Design Thinking?

With all the buzz these days about design thinking, some of you may be wondering what it’s all about. How does it relate to design? And what can non-designers gain from it?

Design thinking is far more than simply designing products and services—it’s an approach to problem-solving that can be applied to an incredibly wide range of applications.

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by Sanjeev Saraf Leave a Comment

BLEVE

BLEVE stands for Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion

If a tank containing liquid is subjected to external fire, the heat from the fire lead to boiling of the liquid. This in turn leads to increased pressure in the tank. This “boiling” liquid and “expanding” vapor may increase the pressure significantly and cause the tank to rupture. If the released liquid is flammable , it can catch on fire resulting in a fire and explosion.

Thinking small

Fatigue cracks that originate at inclusions. Stainless steel intergranular corrosion due to chromium carbide precipitates. Low steel toughness because martensite not tempered enough. Low aluminum strength because of excessive grain boundary precipitation. Orange peel due to large grains.

These are examples of how problems with a metal’s microstructure lead to reliability and performance problems. Of course, there are thousands of examples of microstructures that lead to good reliability and good performance.

One hurdle to understanding metallurgy is being able to think small – very small. Less than a millimeter. Less than a micron. And sometimes on the scale of atoms.

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by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Paul Gladieux – Future of Work – Quality – Interviewed by James Kline

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

Paul Gladieux has over 45 years of experience working in the quality profession. In 1991, he founded Global Quality Management Advisors (GQM Advisors). The group provides quality-related services focused on management system design, development, compliance, and certification in a wide range of sectors. His clients in the energy sector include companies such as: NuScale Power LLC, BWX Technologies, Westinghouse Nuclear AP1000 Program, Terra Power LLC, Worley Energy | Chemicals, U.S. Department of Energy, Westinghouse Nuclear, Vigor Industrials LLC, and Alyeska Pipeline Service Company.

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Day 2 Maintenance Planning Slides with Complete Explanations

Welcome to Day 2 of the Maintenance Planning and Scheduling for World Class Reliability and Maintenance Performance 3-Day Training Course. I hope that you enjoyed Day 1 and found the maintenance and reliability concepts it contained useful.

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by Nancy Regan 1 Comment

Gain Control Over Your Equipment Using Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)

I know. I’m a lady. But it’s not my expression. That’s what my mentor, John Moubray, called it.

And he didn’t apologize for it when he used exactly that term during a one-on-one mentoring session with me.

And to this day, it’s one of the most valuable (and profitable) lessons he ever taught me.

In fact, it helped me win $1,428 in a poker tournament.

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by Larry George 1 Comment

Failure Rate Classification for RCM

Which of these six failure rate functions do your products and their service parts have? You don’t know? You don’t have field reliability lifetime data by product name or part serial number? That’s OK. Lifetime data are not required to estimate and classify failure-rate functions, including attrition and retirement. GAAP requires statistically sufficient field reliability data to classify failure rate functions for RCM.

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by Bryan Christiansen Leave a Comment

When You Should (And Shouldn’t) Use Redundant Equipment To Improve System Reliability

Production processes come to a grinding halt when equipment breaks down. This results in production delays, costs incurred to fix the machine, and opportunity costs. The production process cannot proceed until the maintenance activity on the faulty machine is complete — unless you have provisioned equipment redundancy. [Read more…]

by Sanjeev Saraf Leave a Comment

Have You Considered Inherently Safer Alternatives?

Inherently safer philosophy represents a slightly different approach to risk mitigation. Instead of focusing on mitigating risks, an inherently safer alternative focuses on eliminating the hazards.Let us look at couple of inherently safer examples.

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