Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
All articles listed in reverse chronological order.
A Little History About How I Came Across Learning Teams.
A little over three years ago I was asked to speak at a conference that was entitled, Human Performance, Root Cause and Trending or HPRCT (great conference BTW and I encourage you to attend). This was a different world for me as I typically attended and spoke at Reliability and Maintenance trade conferences, but I was interested to see what it was all about (plus a good friend of mine was the one who invited me).
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I knew not to ask the question. I was almost certain I had heard the exchange correctly. I asked anyway, “Jim, I am not sure I understood you. Can you clarify that?”
“I said Ray is a dick,” blurted Jim at a tone that all 30 people in the room clearly understood. “He knows he is. He thinks he is being funny, but he’s not.”
So much for allowing Jim the opportunity to walk it back. Now, as the lead facilitator of a public decision-making group of twenty, I had to get things back on track. There was a deafening silence, only broken by a few smirks. Most of the group looked horrified.
Disruption is a reality. Disruption will occur. Great facilitators embrace the reality of disruption and are prepared to move through it.
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Companies are constantly looking for ways to identify and implement cost-saving measures. Computerized maintenance management software is used to record, manage, and communicate day-to-day operations in your maintenance department. It’s possible to use CMMS to save money in a number of ways. The following are areas in which large cost savings can result through the implementation of equipment maintenance software
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The Plant and Equipment Wellness Way lets organizations make their operating assets world class reliable so they can enjoy operational excellence success. A Plant Wellness Way EAM System- of-Reliability puts the reliability processes, skills, paradigm, and culture into companies that creates world class reliability and operational excellence.
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Do you have a reliability department, a maintenance department, or a repair department?
Do you avoid failures? Do you avoid or mitigate their consequences?
Or do you wait for things to go wrong, then fix them?
Repairs are all about fixing what has broken. When something breaks you lose whatever functionality it had. It more than likely broke when you were using it too. So you also lost the benefit of that functionality – often production or service delivery capability. The costs include repair, whatever secondary physical damage occurred, the loss of revenues and profits, plus safety and environmental consequences that arise. When something breaks its “useful life” is reduced – deterioration was allowed to accelerate, so even once repaired, the asset has lost some future useful life. The fix for that longer-term deterioration impact is a capital replacement – earlier than need be. If the breakdown was really bad, then it might be much sooner.
[Read more…]Explore what Protective Devices are and why they are so important to Physical Asset Management. Learn what a Failure Finding Task is and what must be considered to formulate the task interval. Come have fun with me as we explore Reliability…all as I get ready to surprise my sister on her Milestone Birthday!
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The presence of certain functional groups is considered an indicator of reactivity. This is the simplest possible reactivity screening method and serves as a guideline for further analysis. For example, chemicals containing the following functional groups can be considered potentially reactive:
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The boiler is the heart of a refinery or power plant. Boiler failures cause forced shutdowns and put the health of the plant at risk.
Some boiler designs run the risk of thermal fatigue failure. During service, the internal waterside surfaces of the tubes form a thin, protective oxide layer. Yet if the strains caused by the combination of (1) thermal expansion and (2) restraint during temperature fluctuations exceed the oxide strain capacity, the oxide cracks. Each thermal cycle will repeatedly crack the oxide, expose fresh metal when then oxidizes, eventually forming a crack. Technically this mode of cracking is corrosion fatigue-driven by thermal cycling. Yet since the boiler water will always be mildly corrosive, for boiler applications this mode of cracking is simply called “thermal fatigue”.
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Think about the three best-facilitated sessions you have ever attended. I will bet the facilitator used some type of activity that you remember. The exercise was unexpected, exciting, and effective.
Now consider the worst facilitated session you attended. If there were any, the exercises were as boring and uninteresting as the rest of the facilitation effort. My bet is that standard PowerPoint presentations and a traditional sticky dot exercise were part of the worst sessions.
Engaging exercises are that draw favorable attention or interest. Some synonyms for engaging make the point better: alluring, appealing, captivating, charismatic, enchanting, entrancing, fascinating, glamorous, magnetic, and seductive. From experience, a facilitated session has a good chance to achieve its outcomes if its exercises rise to the level of ‘engaging.
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Put another way, Can RCA be successful without the incorporation of system’s thinking? What prompted this question was that according to Drs. Leveson and Dekker in their 2014 paper Get To The Root of Accidents, systems thinking is not currently utilized in the application of RCA.
In this paper they cite:
“An often-claimed ‘fact’ is that operators or maintenance workers cause 70–90% of accidents. It is certainly true that operators are blamed for 70–90%”.
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Workforce behavioural observation, behavioural based safety, and a behaviour based safety program all involve observing people doing their work and seeing the safety behaviours they use. They are a proactive approach for getting workplace safety rather than a reactive approach to force safety improvement. The use of BBS is proactive because it gets shopfloor people working together to identify their hidden workplace hazards. It also gets unique data on your employees’ interaction with the hazards they have around them.
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A project with a problem…not a new phenomenon and more likely than not ‘business as usual’ for most, but how do we address the problems on our projects?
Theoretically there’s the risk register and plan with a predetermined set of mitigation actions and designated owners who, although being potential scapegoats, are expected to manage risks magnificently while still dealing with the rest of their, hopefully, nonproblematic scope. Problems plague projects despite alleged prior preparation and proper planning. But it’s the way that people behave and interact that can make all the difference when resolving the problem and keeping the rest of the project on-track.
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“The effects of chance are the most accurately calculable, and the least doubtful of all factors in the evolutionary situation.”
R. A. Fisher, ca. 1953
COVID-19 vaccination claims have changed from “prevention” to “reduced severity.” FDA approved Pfizer’s vaccine for 95% efficacy, compared with the placebo control sample. Pfizer’s placebo sample had 86% efficacy, compared with the US population case rate! Sample subjects resembled each other but not the US population!
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Regardless of your technical background, the higher you move within an organization, the more you need to understand about the organization’s finances.
Accounting is often referred to as the language of business. And I believe it. Before I studied corporate finance and accounting, I often felt lost. I didn’t speak the language. I remember sitting in a board meeting where other managers and board members were reviewing the financials for the organization. And I simply didn’t understand what all the numbers meant. By the time I starting making some simple two connections, the meeting had moved onto the next topic.
[Read more…]Maintenance does not mean the same thing to all people. Operations managers, maintenance supervisors, and reliability engineers can be heard struggling to come to a common understanding.
Historical definitions of maintenance are quite different. “Maintenance” was originally the crime of unlawful abuse of legal procedures and attempts to influence courts. The other historical definition is providing money for operating or living expenses. As a term applied to machinery, maintenance is less than about 150 years old. Preventive maintenance as a literal phrase is even more recent. So who invented this phrase?
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