Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
In manufacturing environments, especially in high-volume production processes, it is important to ensure the highest Machine availability rate for critical equipment as a crucial factor in achieving the expected output goals. The more the availability value there is, the better the plant’s capacity to achieve production requirements since the time available for each piece of equipment will be maximized.
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Are you procrastinating on bringing a goal alive?
If you think dumping a few gallons of water in your oil reservoir would be bad for your rotating equipment, consider the consequences that “striving for perfection” has on your happiness and productivity.
I call it the Prison of Perfection and it’s wicked. It’s where our goals go to die 👿.
A few weeks ago I met with Cesar de Leon who is a pipeline safety expert (http://www.pipelinesafetyconsultant.com) – he worked at the DOT Office of Pipeline Safety for over 23 years and currently resides in Boerne, Texas. Cesar was telling me about legal and technical issues arising in the field of natural gas pipelines from existing regulations… I will discuss these issues in greater details in latter posts. Before getting into current issues, I would like you to read the following guest post from Cesar that provides a brief overview of pipeline integrity management plan.
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How did railroads handle depreciation, repair, and fixed asset life-cycles in the mid 19th Century?
They were experienced in design, construction, project management and business.
They planned for maintenance and for repair.
They knew about wear mechanisms from aggressive operation and thought it was management’s role to contain this.
They shared data and used it. They gathered data from handwritten records, making spreadsheets, graphs, and KPIs by hand.
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The comment is a common one.
“It does not surprise me that they do not want to save $60,000,” quipped the second-in-command of the electrical department. “They are more concerned with being popular and helping their friends.”
“By ‘they,’ I assume you mean the Board and me as the interim Town Manager?” I asked.“Well, not really you, but them – yes,” came a frustrated response.
I decided to move to a more productive line of discussion.
In recent years, “Defect Elimination” has become a hot topic in the reliability world. But what exactly does defect elimination mean? How does it differ from other maintenance practices? Is it more than just a new way to describe planned and predictive maintenance? This article will seek to answer these questions in a very practical manner.
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What’s in a word?
The right word at the right time can make all the difference between a successful negotiation with an amicable agreement and collaborative banter, or a bitter and twisted tête-à-tête with an entrenched stand-off, raised hackles and, at best, fog-horn diplomacy. But what is the ‘right word’; unfortunately, it depends on the time and place and people’s personality but one thing is almost certain, if it begins with “n” it is oftentimes not considered to be right and many consider it to be downright wrong.
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Jim and Richard explore the world of parts, what it takes to keep a proper storeroom, and why forecasting demand is crucial for it.
[Read more…]Would you like age-specific field reliability of your products and their service parts? Age-specific field reliability is useful for reliability prediction, diagnoses, forecasting, warranty reserves, spares stock levels, warranty extensions, and recalls. Nonparametric estimation of age-specific field reliability is easy, if you track parts or products by name and serial number for life data. What if there are life limits? What if there’s no life data?
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George Williams, CEO of ReliabilityX, giving us a breakdown on Vibration Analysis and its best uses.
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In the last two years, I have traveled significantly…have an elite status on three airlines and lots of frequent flyer miles. There are quite a few aspects of a trip that are routine and boring. One such thing is the safety announcement or video at the beginning of each flight. Why do they have it?
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From a holistic RCA perspective…
“What are the top 5 keys to focus on when trying to change a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) culture from one of a reaction to proaction?”
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“So, what did you think about the most recent five-year management assessment?” asked the Agency Director.
I knew it was a loaded question. If the executive team had agreed with the assessment, the chief operating officer would not have asked me to review it before the report was presented to the Board of Directors.
“I had some issues with the report,” I responded. “Out of the gate, they lost me and will probably lose your Board with that multi-colored, busy graph.”
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“Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.” Stephen Covey
If you’ve been reading the FMEA facilitation series, by now you understand the primary facilitation skills. Studying and applying these skills will help you achieve excellent results in FMEA applications. [Read more…]
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
