team Archives - Accendo Reliability

Old School Team Building

I’m facilitating an RCM Analysis this week in a second-floor conference room that overlooks a company courtyard complete with manicured landscaping, picnic tables, park benches and walking path complete with distance markers. While this park like setting has been mostly empty the first few days this week today there is a group of 30 people milling around. Some small groups of 2 or 3 are clustered together talking and most everyone is checking out their smart phone for various unknown reasons. I can’t help but wonder what is going on so I ask the team I’m working with why so many people are in the courtyard. [Read more…]

by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Building a Highly Successful Team Model

Welcome to part two of my 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance. To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles, I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital intensive industry.

Uptime Insights Part Two:

Building a Highly Successful Team Model

Any organization is nothing more than an extension of the people who make it up. It stands to reason that we need to focus on people if we want our organizations to thrive and change. Without your people nothing happens. They are the most important part of your business. If you want excellence your people need to choose it with you. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

How to Spot Reliability-Minded Coworkers

Being the reliability engineer on a project doesn’t have to be a lonely assignment.

Nearly everyone on the team shares the same goal. That of creating a reliable product or maintaining equipment availability.

Other may be electrical or mechanical engineers, technicians, procurement or some other part of the organization, yet they all have something to contribute to improving reliability.

Sometimes you have to find the reliability-minded individuals – to assist when gathering information – to identify potential weaknesses – to provide support for a reliability task – to encourage others to fully consider reliability with each decision [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Creating Reliability Champions

How do you find, encourage and develop reliability professionals across your organization? We all face the challenge of creating a culture of reliability within an organization at some point in our careers.

Do so alone is nearly impossible.

You need support. You need more hands and minds that can spot reliability opportunities. You need to be in dozens of conversations per hour across the organization.

This is difficult for one person to accomplish.

[Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Reliability Program of One

All Reliability Tasks

Having been invited to evaluate reliability practices within a company, I conducted a series of interviews with various staff members. When asked any question on the reliability techniques used, members of the engineering, procurement, operations, and quality departments all responded with nearly the same comment: “Oh, the reliability guy does that.” It appeared that the organization had one reliability engineer who did everything related to reliability. His interview was scheduled last that day. I was looking forward to meeting him. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

No Feedback

Imagine you are requested to assist a design team in determining how to best improve the reliability of a product. You learn that the organization produces a range of point of sale (POS) devices and they have invited you to a meeting with their staff to discuss the product and ways to improve the field reliability.

To help understand the situation, you may have already started to think of a set of questions whose answers would lead to suitable recommendations: [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Reliability Maturity Matrix

The concept of a maturity model is not new. It provides a means to identify the current state and illuminate the possible improvements to a reliability program. The matrix serves a guide to assist an organization in improving its program.

The matrix has five stages. In general, the higher stages are most cost effective and efficient at achieving higher rates of product reliability performance. These stages—uncertainty, awaking, enlightenment, wisdom, and certainty—are described in today’s post. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Product Reliability Participants part 7

This will be the last of the series, considering the different positions in an organization that deals with product reliability. We’ve moved away from the positions where the focus on reliability is central, but there are important considerations in relation to product reliability for each of these roles still. In this concluding post the subjects are the manufacturing team, and field service and call center staffs. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Product Reliability Participants part 6

In this installment of the series dealing with the myriad participants within an organization, we’ll start with failure analysis specialists, before moving to marketing and sales, and finally getting to the finance team. We’re moving away from the positions where the focus on reliability is central, but there are important considerations in relation to product reliability for each of these roles still. The next post in this series will be the final one. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Product Reliability Participants part 5

Continuing the series where we examine various roles within an organization and the ways in which each role interacts and affects product reliability, this post will start off with procurement engineers and managers. Since each role hereafter is a bit less involved, multiple roles will be grouped together. After procurement, we’ll take a look at warranty managers. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Product Reliability Participants part 4

The last post moved into the role of quality and reliability engineers, and the influence that leadership in design and product development has on the product reliability process. Similarly, this post will move to Q & R managers, again looking at the role of that position in relation to product reliability.

[Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Product Reliability Participants – Part 2

The last post in this series dealt with the design team, and the influence that team has on the product reliability process. This post will turn to product development and design managers, again looking at the role of that position in relation to product reliability. The series of posts on reliability participants will continue after today’s post with the roles of quality and reliability engineers and managers.

[Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Product Reliability Participants – Part 1

An effective product reliability process requires a strong team, at every level. The team of employees within an organization that participate and impact product reliability is a vast and widespread group of people. They include members of the design team, design managers, quality and reliability engineers and managers, procurement engineers and managers, warranty managers, failure analysis specialists, members of the marketing and sales staff, members of the finance and manufacturing teams, and field service and call center staffs. [Read more…]