Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
When it is necessary to check 100% of parts for one or more characteristic?
There are situations where 100% of manufactured parts are checked. These include visual inspection, measurements of a part characteristic, and a reaction to low process capability. These may be accomplished manually or an automated process.
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Businesses, to be competitive, need to control all costs. Product or service failure can result in large uncontrolled costs. As product development proceeds, the cost of failures increases. The concept is shown in figure 1.
Figure 1
If a manufacturing plant was a human brain: Maintenance would be the repairing blood flow, Operations would be the electricity sparking between synapses, and Reliability would be the conscience. [Read more…]
Planning and Implementing a risk management framework is an admirable accomplishment. Now make sure it is running well and will do so into the future.
As with any process, there will be opportunities to make improvements. By monitoring and reviewing your program you will find what is working well and what is not. [Read more…]
Risk is an interesting concept because there are a number of definitions and interpretations. And this bears on quality because the lack of consistency can make deployment difficult.
Two elements to risk can be seen in the below definitions. There is upside risk and there is downside risk. Some risk definitions have this and others don’t. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Umberto Tunesi (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Mens Sana in Corpore Sano (A Sound Mind in a Sound Body).
It could also be translated that quality of life is more important than the span of life, the number of years you live.
Or that medicine’s task is not to add years to your life but the life to your years.
And it might also be that such a formula for life – originally a Juvenal’s wish or prayer – is much more ancient than its Latin transcription. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Umberto Tunesi (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Or, why we are not listened to?
Why don’t we listen to those who – justifiably – cry wolf?
Be others or ourselves, it does not matter.
The output of this regrettable way of thinking often results in a “chronicle of a death foretold”. What do I mean? [Read more…]
Guest Post by Paul Kostek (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
You’ve completed your project’s Risk Management Plan and now you can move forward with project execution because all of the project’s risks have been identified what can go wrong? Well plenty. It’s easy to get caught up in weekly (daily) reviews of the identified risks, tracking status (are the boxes going green, yellow, oh no red?). [Read more…]
Guest Post by Paul Kostek (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
You’ve no doubt read about Google’s driverless car and the effort at the state level to gain permission for its use on public roads.
There are the obvious concerns and risks with operating a driverless car, though Google does have someone sitting behind the wheel, just in case. Of course, can a person just along for the ride respond fast enough to a problem? This becomes one of the risk areas needing to be addressed before full adoption of driverless vehicles. Integrated with Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) we’ll see vehicles and roads sharing data with each other to produce safer travel and relief of congestion. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Paul Kostek (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
I usually write about risk as related to projects, but several of the comments I received on my article on “Can Your Pacemaker be Hacked” made me realize that we are all faced with risk management in our personal lives.
Continuing on the medical topic, think about how many options you’re faced with when your doctor recommends a procedure, whether adding a pacemaker, replacing a joint or a prescription drug.
Hopefully you have a doctor that you trust and knows you, but how would you respond to the doctor recommending a procedure? If we use a risk process then we’d have to consider the possibility of the identified risk occurring, the impact on our life(style), the benefits of mitigating the risk.
To support our decision we could get a second opinion, do on-line research or check with family/friends that have had the same procedure. Then just like a manager assigning a risk we’d have to review the data we collected and make a decision. The advent of Electronic Medical Records should make life easier, but also lead to more challenges for managing/securing data. [Read more…]
Making the criticality analysis work for you and drive improvements in the maintenance strategy
Most manufacturers do not have an up to date criticality analysis and those that do have one, do not use it to drive decisions. Having a criticality analysis facilitates improved decision making and prioritization within the site and business.
How many times are there debates regarding which work needs to be done, which PMs will be dropped from the schedule because the planned downtime was reduced? These debates occur regularly, but to not have to occur. A criticality analysis drives improvements in the business by: [Read more…]
Guest Post by Paul Kostek (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Hack a pacemaker? Is this a real problem?
Some recent experiments have been able to hack a pacemaker and other medical devices including an insulin pump. The weakness of these systems was the analog sensors attached to the body to gather information. These analog inputs bypass the internal security and are converted directly to digital signals.
From a risk perspective is this something medical device manufacturers , insurance companies and the medical professionals need to worry about? It was part of a conversation at the Black Hat @Design West Conference where considerable discussion was held on building defensive walls. [Read more…]
Understanding the risks allow effective mitigation plans to be put in place
Where is your biggest risk to the site? If you can’t answer that, than your maintenance program is most likely not adequate. As previously discussed, an effective maintenance program must align with business and its needs. A criticality analysis allows the site to understand where there are risks that must be managed. [Read more…]
RCM has two potential uses – to set you up for success or to regain success from the jaws of failure.
Regardless of when you use it though, RCM alone isn’t enough to get all the benefits. Applying it after the systems are in service, to recover shortfalls in performance, and then failing to follow up on RCM’s results only delivers part of the benefit. That’s where the aircraft and nuclear industries and the military have it right – they take those extra needed steps. The rest of us don’t! [Read more…]
Guest Post by Paul Kostek (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
After writing several articles about topics related to medical devices and big data, thought I’d explore a new area, risk and space tourism.
Though I will include one interesting note about medical devices, on the October 20th episode of 60 Minutes former VP Dick Cheney admitted that he had the external programming capability for his defibrillator turned off to prevent it from being hacked. So, even as people question the possibility of this occurring we have a real world example of the steps taken to prevent this from happening. Think risk mitigation. [Read more…]