Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
All articles listed in reverse chronological order.
Written by Mike Sondalini as a memo to his younger self, the content has been adapted into an article format. Given the depth of detailed information contained, this article is better considered a technical document. It summarizes Mike’s key learnings from decades of research, consulting, and training in the Plant Wellness Way EAM methodology.
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Are you ready to ramp back up?
Slowing down reduced supply and raised prices. Survival cost-cutting also put our companies into a state of Covid-induced paralysis. Like a person who is paralyzed – vital systems keep working so we survive, but growth, movement, and improvement all stop. I recall a soccer accident where my knee was damaged. I wasn’t paralyzed but that one leg was immobilized. It took me months to recover after the surgery was completed. The muscles in my leg had shrunk and strength needed to be rebuilt. In normal times, I’d have kept using the muscles and they would have strengthened, not shrunk.
In the previous articles I discussed the component design process, the considerations for designing components, and the importance of leveraging materials engineering to design components that meet performance and reliability requirements at low cost.
I will start focusing on reliability, discussing the considerations for identifying component and joint reliability requirements. I will refer only to components for ease of writing and reading, but the discussion also applies to metallurgical joints, i.e. weld, braze, and solder joints.
In this article, I will discuss identification of the conditions that can cause degradation of the materials that comprise components and joints. [Read more…]
I love yogurt and eat it every day 🥄. My favorite is Oikos Lemon Meringue 🍋. I buy it every week.
But one day, I was unpacking my grocery bags and found that I had bought banana flavored (yuck! 🥺) instead of Lemon Meringue.
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Step 1: Know your role and your responsibilities
The first step in creating more self-accountability is to start by making an assessment of what your role is and what those specific responsibilities are.
If you’re a father, your role and responsibilities are very different than if you’re the head of an emergency room, or if you’re coach of a basketball team. Every area of your life can have different roles, but the responsibilities of being a father, for example, can impact the responsibilities of being an entrepreneur. You will need to think about how late nights in the office can affect missing Timmy’s baseball game into your plan.
[Read more…]No discussion about managerial skills would be complete without talking about time management. Effective managers are excellent at utilizing their time. More than just their time, successful managers proficiently steward the range resources under their control … the people, the equipment, and the finances. But time is the most valuable of them all.
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Reliability-based forecasts can be made from field data on complaints, failures, repairs, age-replacements (life limits), NTFs (no trouble found), WEAP (warranty expiration anticipation phenomenon), spares, warranty claims, or deaths. Some spares inventory forecasting software says… “Please enter forecast______” No kidding. 1800 years ago Roman Jurist Ulpian made actuarial pension cost forecasts for retiring Roman Legionnaires. Would you like actuarial forecasts? Their distributions? Stock recommendations?
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Citizens often oppose chemical process facilities near their community because of potential for high consequence events. This risk aversion of society is commonly referred to as NIMBY (Not-in-my-backyard). The risk aversion is based not by taking into account annual fatalities but based on potential worst-case catastrophe. Thus the main factor influencing risk perception is catastrophic consequence potential.
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Much has been written about James Reason’s original Swiss Cheese Model described in his book Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents. Figure 1 is a basic representation of this model. Many today consider this model to be obsolete because of the evolving complexity of systems due to emerging technologies. Therefore, the linearity of failure expressed in this original model, is not as applicable as it was when introduced.
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Keeping it honest, layoffs suck.
They suck for the targeted employees and they suck for their immediate supervision and management.
In 1981 I was hired by our area’s largest employer at the time as an incoming apprentice. The day I was hired my soon to be wife and I celebrated she as a schoolteacher and I now had lifelong employment. We could now get married, buy a home, and start a family. In three years it took for me to complete my apprenticeship and for her to complete her master’s in education, we did just that. Life for this young family couldn’t have been better.
And then the layoffs started.
Things get a little dirty when humans get involved. In any system, human behavior and human understanding “gum up” the process. These are a few of the dirty secrets for effective communications.
Communication is the exchange of information from one person to another.
Communication requires a sender, a receiver, and a message. Technical professionals (sender) usually believe the decision maker (receiver) cannot understand the message because the decision maker is not as smart as they are. Most of the time, the lack of understanding comes from the noise generated by the sender. The burden of effective communication is on the send (technical professional), not the receiver (decision maker). [Read more…]
My contention is management many times compromises quality to mitigate budget and cost issues resulting in a major risk to the project.
How to minimize the quality risk on a project is addressed in this paper. The approach to do this is based on my 30 years of project and project risk management experience and knowledge. Let’s start with a story to illustrate my contention.
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We love great success stories: The wizard entrepreneur; the person who crusaded for a worthy cause; the champion athlete; the financial guru; the innovative business solution with astounding results; the failing firm that turned their fortunes around; the penniless emigrant whose wits made them wealthy. Those stories are inspirational. They challenge us to be better. They make us want to achieve more in our life roles and with our lives.
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Covid scared us all! Here you can see two Red Pandas with their version of a threatening response. When threatened, we will have one of three reactions – fight, flight, or freeze.
Our businesses also have similar responses. A few have fought – and they “pivoted.” Some fled – they folded up and went away. Many simply froze – they halted just about everything. If your business froze, then this article is for you.
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Asset reliability programs are a set of initiatives for tracking the health, effectiveness and locations of both fixed and moveable assets. It involves routine maintenance, as well as the collection and analysis of equipment operating data to measure efficiency throughout their useful lives.
A good reliability engineering program provides insight on the frequency of asset failures, cost of operation, maintenance and repair, and the quality of maintenance work. Over time, an organization needs to evaluate metrics such as mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), and mean time to failure (MTTF) to ascertain the suitability of the selected maintenance strategy. [Read more…]