Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
Think back to the restaurant mess we talked about a few pages back, who was responsible?
The lesson for grown-ups (and more importantly executives and business leaders) from The Boy Who Cried Wolf is that the boy was at fault when he lied the first time, but the person who was really responsible for the sheep being lost was the shepherd who left his flock with a boy who he knew couldn’t be trusted.
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The Instantaneous Cost and Failure from Breakdowns is Huge. When a failure incident occurs, there is a consequential loss of profits and amassing of costs. The cost of failure includes lost profit, the cost of repair, fixed and variable operating costs wasted during the downtime, and a myriad of consequential costs that surge through the business. They are all paid for by the organisation and seen as poor financial performance. The costs of failure cannot be escaped and are counted in fortunes of lost profit per year. Total defect and failure true costs are not normally recognised by managers, yet they can send businesses bankrupt. In the instance of a failure, all its costs and losses are automatically incurred on the business. These costs can only be prevented by not having the failure in the first place. This article explains the ‘Instantaneous Cost of Failure’ (ICOF) and introduces a proactive technique, ‘Defect and Failure True Costing’, that helps companies recognise and prevent this tremendous waste of money.
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Read about the Requirements for the Content of the ISO 9001 Quality Manual Lead Document from which the rest of an ISO 9001 Quality System Cascades
An ISO 9001 Quality Management System requires a ISO 9001 Quality Manual that contains all the details of how your business is run to produce your products or services to a quality standard.
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CBM or Condition-Based Maintenance is a maintenance approach that includes these five facts:
A good mental framework to have is that instead of you pushing towards accomplishing goals, you think about what things you have to “pull” to get to the end game. The subtle shift in the thinking will position you to find more creative solutions to problems. A very frequent problem with management who doesn’t really know how to solve problems is saying things like “work harder”. If we just turn up the Hard Work Dial to 11, then the problems will go away, obviously. Instead if we looked at what is stopping the success and actively worked on removing those problems, we’d be able to remove the stress of failure without having to break the Hard Work Dial.
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In 1653, “An Act for Constituting Commissioners for Ordering And Managing the Affairs of the Admiralty And Navy” established the responsibilities of the Admiralty and Commissioners of the Navy. The Commissioners were to make policy for building, fitting out, “repairing and preserving,” and “sale and disposal of old and unserviceable ships and vessels.” Another duty was to conduct a survey (i.e. an inventory) of the nation’s ships and naval stores, an element carried over from Monson’s Tracts in 1624.
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Questions and queries asked following a screw feeder shaft breakage on a 15m long fertiliser dust transfer feed conveyor
If you have rotating shafts breaking at the drive-end of the auger shaft you may have a combination of bending and torsional fatigue. You are welcome to read the series of emails and responses below to a screw conveyor auger drive end failure.
To increase reliability, you need to decrease the chances of failure occurring. Each chance of failure creates risk. Operating risk can be mitigated and managed by meeting all 15 Precision Maintenance excellence targets.
This list of precision maintenance excellence targets is how to ensure component parts, and the equipment they are in, always operate with optimal reliability. Each requirement must be met to the highest standard. By doing this your equipment and machinery are operating with the least microstructure stress possible and getting utmost reliability.
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Here’s a common situation that most of us have experienced in our careers or education:
You’re working on a project with a tight deadline, the task is do-able, but difficult. Everyone has their specific tasks assigned, and the whole team is working together on a final document to turn in. Your section is the financial analysis portion of the project.
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Abstract: Many companies struggle with constant plant and equipment problems despite doing the very best they know how to keep their plant and machinery reliable. Their real problem, which they cannot see for themselves, is that what is done in the company is completely wrong for creating highly reliable production equipment. If you cannot “see” how reliability is destroyed in your business, then you are doomed to suffer poor reliability and low uptime forevermore.
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In today’s competitive business environment, reliable equipment operation is crucial for uninterrupted operations and increased productivity. On the other hand, saving on maintenance costs can be a perilous path to tread.
Maintaining a balance between the two factors can have far-reaching effects, potentially even raising maintenance costs. The solution lies in optimizing equipment reliability, making it the bedrock of maintenance efforts.
It may be difficult to accelerate double-digit percentage cost reductions in some industries, such as pharmaceuticals and nuclear. Nonetheless, the primary focus should be on improving equipment reliability, which could lead to lower maintenance costs. [Read more…]
Here is a great example from an industrial operation of a maintenance procedure using an Accuracy Controlled Enterprise (ACE) 3T standard operating procedure (SOP) format. To make it better would need photos and/or videos included for critical tasks. 3T stands for Target-Tolerance-Test, which are the minimum criteria needed to specify maintenance task quality and prove compliance. The 3T’s are a simple maintenance work quality assurance technique we invented to maximise the chance of doing outstandingly high-quality maintenance work that brings you outstanding plant and equipment reliability.
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We’ve spoken enough about the psychology of self-discipline, let’s get into actionable steps, things that are easy to remember and implement on a day to day basis. If writing some of these down on a post-it note help remind you, do it.
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William Sutherland was a ship’s master carpenter in the late 1600s. Returning to shore, he became a foreman in the Portsmouth dockyard, then was promoted to be a senior manager at the Deptford yard. Sutherland wrote two books about naval architecture and ship construction. His 1717 book Britain’s Glory: or Ship-Building Unvail’d documented lifecycle maintenance in the Royal Navy.
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If you have rotating shafts breaking at the centre of the span then you quite likely have a metal fatigue problem. Take a read of the report below.
The 316L stainless steel screw feeder shaft on a 3200mm long, 260mm diameter, 1:1 pitch flight screw broke in the middle. The shaft was 50mm Schedule 40 316L stainless steel pipe. The screw flight was 6mm thick 316L plate stitch welded to the shaft. The screw had been replaced new only 4 weeks prior. The screw was removed from the trough in two pieces and the break was at the middle of the screw. The break was generally square to the shaft.
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