Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
All articles listed in reverse chronological order.
An Overview of how it can help a business
A presenation by Mike Sondalini
Three universal problems in business…
Lean Manufacturing provides tools and solutions to address them
Bruce is an active company director and audit committee chair. He is a well-respected transformational leader with deep and broad professional governance, risk, compliance and audit experience. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours of 2015 in recognition of his significant service to public administration through governance and risk management practices, and to the profession of internal auditing.
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George Williams, CEO of ReliabilityX, providing insight on using Motion Amplification technology and its benefits.
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Have you ever procrastinated? The struggle is real. I found myself in the web of fear and overwhelm…until I did this
Chemical Facility Anti Terrorism Standard (CFATS) came into force on Nov. 20, 2007 as a Federal Regulation under 6 CFR 27. This set into motion the process of assessing threats to chemical plants and refineries in the U.S.
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“I have a question,” stated the Chief Financial Officer. “The second data point from the right end of the line the drastically different than the others. How do you know that the line should be straight? Should not the cost line be curved between the last two data points?”
“Well, when we look at the correlation of the best-fit line with and without the point you reference, we obtain a nearly ideal fit when we treat the second point from the end as an anomaly,” stated the highly educated, high-brow consultant was discussing the agenda item before mine. His second sentence was equally long as he started launching into details about correlation and how the computer program cyphered through all of the data.
An undesirable event occurs (fancy term for unexpected failure) a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is triggered. This usually means what occurred is a severe event as triggers are often set pretty high (i.e. – reportable injury/fatality, equipment damage in excess of x-thousands of dollars, production losses in excess of x-thousands of dollars, regulatory violation, etc.). Since there is urgency and visibility, how do I decide who will lead the investigation/RCA? Our natural tendency is to identify the technical ‘expert’ in the nature of whatever the undesirable event was. But does that typically produce the most effective outcome for the organization and its employees? This article will focus on which skills are needed most, under such conditions, and why
Despite our collective educational establishments that purport to teach so that people can learn, ‘education’ is not necessarily learning. Mark Twain wrote disparagingly that “Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned” and also that he never let schooling interfere with his own education. Education is not necessarily knowledge and real learning comes from the application of theory tempered with experience which will make for better decisions and better outcomes. Benjamin Franklin’s words from over 200 years’ ago “Tell me, I forget. Teach me, I remember. Involve me and I learn” still ring true today.
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The gang talks about how to start building proper data, and the trials and tribulations in convincing other departments of your causes.
[Read more…]“Chance-of Success-Mapping” is probably the most revolutionary concept used in Industrial and Manufacturing Wellness. It is certainly one that will help managers most when they want the best choices for their organization
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I needed multivariate fragility functions for seismic risk analysis of nuclear power plants. I didn’t have any test data, so Lawrence Livermore Lab paid “experts” for their opinions! I set up the questionnaires, asked for percentiles, salted the sample to check for bias, asked for percentiles of conditional fragility functions to estimate correlations, and fixed pairwise correlations to make legitimate multivariate correlation matrixes. Subjective percentiles provide more distribution information than parameter or distribution assumptions, RPNs, ABCD, high-medium-low, or RCM risk classifications.
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When designing equipment and processes, engineers leave a safety margin that ensures equipment remains functional when a fault or defect is affecting it partially or wholly. Minor defects affecting production assets should not cause immediate breakdowns. A fault-tolerant system remains operational for predetermined intervals before undertaking corrective measures. Faults affecting the operation of different systems emanate from more than a single source. [Read more…]
According to a recent report (Aug. 2008) from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) is not in compliance with its statutory mandates. The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents and has been in operation since 1998. GAO report states that CSB is not investigating all chemical releases that have a fatality, serious injury, substantial property damage, or the potential for a fatality, serious injury, or substantial property damage. [Read more…]
The technician explained it to me like this: “The part costs only $5, but I need to disassemble other stuff to get to it, so my labor charge will be $300. But don’t worry, I replace lots of these.”
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