Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
The management and organization can create heroes and reliability leaders by their behavior. When an asset breaks down, some people in the workforce fix it quickly. We may celebrate their work as heroic, but another group of people fix things rapidly while finding and eliminating root causes. These proactive individuals are the real heroes, also known as Reliability Leaders. This webinar discusses the attributes of reliability leaders: the real heroes.
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“I can’t believe you asked him if he married a trophy wife,” my colleague stated. “Even more, I can’t believe he answered it without getting mad. Or that he told you so much about his first marriage and himself.”
“Well, the key was that I kept the questions short and followed where he took the conversation,” I replied. “On its own, the trophy wife is a bit over the top. But in the larger context, it flowed with everything he described and his comfort in discussing it with me.”
Effective communication is important in all relationships. The opening story was among business colleagues after a professional association meeting. While it is a bit personal, it reminds us that asking good questions – including in business environments – is personal.
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Just back from the Reliability and Maintainability Symposium and not happy. While there are signs, a proudly worn button, regular mentions of progress and support, we still talk about reliability using MTBF too often. We need to avoid MTBF actively, no, I mean aggressively.
Let’s get the message out there concerning the folly of using MTBF as a surrogate to discuss reliability. We need to work relentlessly to avoid MTBF in all occasions.
Teaching reliability statistics does not require the teaching of MTBF.
Describing product reliability performance does not benefit by using MTBF.
Creating reliability predictions that create MTBF values doesn’t make sense in most if not all cases. [Read more…]
HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Testing) is the foundation for the definition of HASS (Highly Accelerated Stress Screening) and HASA (Highly Accelerated Stress Audit).
HALT is primarily used to expose weaknesses in the design of a product by subjecting it to extreme environmental conditions such as temperature, vibration, and humidity, in order to identify and eliminate design flaws and weak points before the product is released to the market.
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When the electricity grid fails, there is a risk of cascading impacts from what might seem to be a relatively minor event.
Having just watched a Electric Power video on this very topic, I feel obligated to inform the masses, what would happen if the power grid shut down?
If the power grid goes down, water and natural gas will also likely fail at some point, so planning is critical. Without a plan in place, most of us would be in bad shape with an extended grid outage.
To get world class operation and profits your Asset Lifecycle Management System must prevent every opportunity for defect-creation in all life cycle phases, for all your operating equipment
Every physical asset has a lifecycle starting at conception through to its eventual disposal and site remediation. In each phase of the lifecycle errors can occur that cause defects within the asset. In operations with hundreds of assets there easily can be tens-of-thousands of defects. Each defect is a risk that eventually contributes to breakdowns, losses, wastes, safety incidents during operation, and shortens the asset’s service lifetime. Eliminating thousands of defects and risks forever is what Plant Wellness Way EAM does for its users.
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Join me, Nancy Regan, as I guide you through the process of effectively defining the scope of your Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) analysis to ensure you achieve your desired analysis goals. In this video, I’ll illustrate the importance of tailoring the RCM analysis scope using a practical example of a Plant Air system. Key Takeaways: • Understanding Scope: Learn how to avoid common pitfalls by appropriately narrowing down your analysis to a manageable size. • Adapting to Environments: Gain insights into how identical equipment can behave differently in varied operational environments and why specifying your analysis scope is crucial for clarity and effectiveness. • Goal-Oriented Analysis: Understand how the goals of your RCM analysis, such as developing a proactive maintenance plan, dictate the scope and focus of your analysis. What’s Next?: Stay tuned for tomorrow’s video where I delve deeper into why accurately identifying the scope of analysis is foundational to successful RCM analysis planning. Subscribe and hit the bell icon to follow along with the “100 Days of Reliability” series and enhance your Maintenance and Reliability knowledge with expert insights. Thank you for watching! Remember, the success of your RCM efforts starts with the right scope!
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Dear friends, we are happy to release this second video on Hypothesis Testing! In this video, Hemant Urdhwareshe explains One Sample t-test along with illustrations of Student’s t-distribution. Hemant has also explained the concept of degrees of freedom and p-value in this video.
We recommend viewers to watch Hypothesis Testing, Part-1 video before this video.
We are sure, you will find this useful!
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As an industrial statistics consultant for the past 25 years, I have frequently fielded questions related to sample size determination. Unfortunately, I have encountered many instances where simple rules of thumb were used for any purpose (like always use 30). Sample size guidance really depends on what the goal of the study is, the type of data we are dealing with, what statistical method we are using and some other factors as well. Common activities which typically require sample size determination include:
All these applications require different assumptions and calculations to determine an appropriate sample size. In this article, we focus on Sample Size determination for Hypothesis Testing. It is assumed that the reader is already familiar with Hypothesis Testing.
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Understanding the different types of data and thier respective uses is critical for product delveopment testing and analysis.
Each type of eo f data plays a a role in ensuring that products meet quality standards and fulfill user needs.
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The urge to ask questions can sometimes feel redundant, especially when you already have the answers. When you’re on the verge of holding back a question you already know the answer to, pause and consider your motives. As a facilitator, what impact are you aiming for? Are you looking to guide the group toward understanding, or are you merely asserting dominance with your knowledge? Assessing the significance of arriving at a predetermined answer versus fostering an environment of collaboration and openness is essential.
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MTBF use and thinking is still rampant. It affects how our peers and colleagues approach solving problems.
There is a full range of problems that come from using MTBF, yet how do you spot the signs of MTBF thinking even when MTBF is not mentioned? Let’s explore the approaches that you can use to ferret out MTBF thinking and move your organization toward making informed decisions concerning reliability. [Read more…]
The Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) on June 20, 2022, issued an exposure draft on the disclosure of certain risks. This piece examines the requirements and problems.
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Learn what you need to know and do to quickly have world class maintenance and reliability excellence in your operation
In 2002 I wrote a small book after visiting Sumitomo Chemicals in Japan called the Japanese Path to Maintenance and Reliability Excellence. It explained the maintenance and reliability philosophy and attitudes that got Sumitomo Chemicals amazingly high chemical process plant uptime.
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Saving 20% of your maintenance costs is achievable in many operations. Are you running your production equipment to failure? Is your maintenance spending consistently higher than you budget allows? Are you frustrated that breakdowns cause delays in delivery schedules? If you answer “yes” to any of those questions, then savings and production gains are possible. The 20% figure is arbitrary but truly indicative of what is possible. Reliable production equipment is far cheaper to maintain simply because it is reliable, but it must be maintained. It requires the right maintenance being done the right way, and at the right times. Get that right and you save operating costs, AND you gain productive uptime with its attendant revenue.
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