I had been away from writing blog posts for last 3 months or so…mainly because of my travel to S. Korea. I have also been kept busy working on adding advanced features to Risk and Safety site. I will unveil them in the coming few months.
[Read more…]Archives for March 2023
Risk Prioritization in FMEA – a Summary
What Are Best Practices for Facilitating Qualitative Assessments?
Opinion-based data is the foundation of qualitative assessments. Qualitative assessments are used in various applications, including asset management, risk management, human reliability analysis, and customer surveys. The usefulness of any qualitative assessment is a function of design, analysis, and administration. The article provides best practices for improving administering and facilitating qualitative assessments.
A Long History with Many Forms
The modern basis of opinion-based data’s scientific use can be traced from the western hemisphere to the late 1800s. Educators and psychologists were seeking to quantify their clinical observations of human behavior. A similar movement was underway in the fields of natural science and statistics.
[Read more…]So, What’s Still Wrong with Maintenance
Enterprise Asset Management and Maintenance will Always be Spectacularly Unsuccessful at Delivering Failure-Free Equipment, Until you Change to an Equipment Wellness Paradigm
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The role of Maintenance is to eliminate operating equipment risks. Yet, organizations using Preventive and Predictive Maintenance strategies still have equipment breakdowns. They still have forced outages and stoppages. They consistently get emergency repairs. So, what makes today’s Maintenance paradigm so unsuccessful at equipment risk elimination? Because it is the wrong paradigm to use. The right mindset to have is an equipment wellness paradigm!
[Read more…]Foundation of Great Project Outcomes – Structures
Guest Post by Malcolm Peart (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Structures are all around us, even chaos has structure albeit fractal. We humans too involved in structures; not only do we construct physical structures, but we form organisational structures and create civilizations using the social, economic and cultural structures that rule our lives.
Some of these structures collapse due to human error, natural forces outside of our control, and man’s destructive and violent nature. The reasons for such collapses may not be understood but, being inquisitive we strive to find out. But these endeavours are not only earthbound as we also seek to work out the structure of the universe and its workings. An early example of such work is from the astronomer Kepler who developed his model of our solar system. Although geometrically fascinating it’s a far cry from our modern-day perceptions
[Read more…]What is the Difference Between Quality Assurance and Quality Control?
One of the most commonly asked questions about quality engineering is “What is the difference between quality assurance and quality control?”
Covariance of the Kaplan-Meier Estimators?
What are the covariances of Kaplan-Meier reliability estimates at different ages? I need them for the variance of actuarial demand forecasts and for confidence bands on reliability. I thought cohort reliability estimate variances and covariances in the previous article were a good idea. How good? Not as good as bootstrap and jackknife resampling alternatives!
The Kaplan-Meier reliability function estimator uses right-censored and grouped time-to-failure counts in periodic cohorts (rows in table 1). The Nelson-Aalen cumulative failure rate function estimators are theoretically independent [Aalen, Nelson], but not for some examples. The Kaplan-Meier reliability and actuarial failure rate function estimates at different ages are dependent, so their covariances matter to actuarial forecasts and confidence bands on reliability.
[Read more…]Use Of RFID In Process Safety: Track Hazardous Chemicals And Track Personnel
RFID stands for Radio-Frequency IDentification. It is a small electronic device that consist of a chip (capable of carrying 2000 bytes of data) and an antenna.
A RFID device provides a unique identifier and serves the same purpose as a bar code on a consumer product or a magnetic strip on the back of a credit card.
[Read more…]How to Reduce Maintenance Cost The Right Way
How to reduce maintenance cost the right way comes up a lot for our clients. Unfortunately, many organizations often have the goal of reducing maintenance cost. While the maintenance cost is an important long-term outcome of maintenance management, it should not be the main goal. If the reduction of maintenance cost is the main goal for maintenance, the organization is on the wrong track and will eventually fail.
[Read more…]Significance Over Success. Innovation Over Change. Anticipation Over Agility
Guest Post by Daniel Burrus (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Question for all who read this: to succeed at any business venture, you merely need to have huge resources, dedicated personnel, and a quality product or service, right? From there, it’s just collecting money and living a good life.
This presumption is more common than you realize, and could not be more wrong and misguided. In a world where exponential change and digital disruptions abound, you simply cannot rest on your laurels and merely rely on what you’ve already built. Because of the rapidly accelerating rate of change, your business is only ever as strong as its next innovation.
[Read more…]Maintenance Planning and Scheduling for World Class Reliability and Maintenance Performance
3-Day Training Course
Day 3 Maintenance Planning and Maintenance Scheduling Slides with Complete Explanations
Welcome to the final day of the Maintenance Planning and Scheduling for World Class Reliability and Maintenance Performance 3-Day Training Course. I hope that you enjoyed Days 1 and 2 and found the maintenance, reliability, work quality control and work planning concepts they contained useful.
[Read more…]Self-Discipline Part 1
In our previous chapters, we talked about how the topics of the three previous chapters work together. In our analogy, we’re sailing a sailboat to the North Pole.
This is done by using self-awareness as an understanding of where your starting point on the journey is, with a focus on radical honesty, as lying to yourself is as useless as not even starting to reflect.
[Read more…]Is Safety Training Helpful?
Workplace Safety training is a big industry…every year companies are spending millions of dollars on training their employees.
I have always doubted the efficacy of repetitive and boring training sessions whether personal or virtual (Will your Refresher Training Work?). What is more surprising is that organizations are increasing their training budget without evaluating efficacy of their training program.
[Read more…]FINESSE Facilitation: What Are Best Practices for Qualitative Assessment Analysis?
Opinion-based data is the foundation of qualitative assessments. Qualitative assessments are used in various applications, including asset management, risk management, human reliability analysis, and customer surveys. The usefulness of any qualitative assessment is a function of best practices associated with design, analysis, and administration.
The article provides best practices for improving qualitative assessment analysis. Facilitators develop and use qualitative assessments in the execution of their work. Facilitators should be aware of qualitative assessment analysis as they seek to bring a group of participants to solutions that are created, understood, and accepted by all.
[Read more…]ISO 9001 Context and in the Real World, What do we do?
Guest Post by John Mason (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
A classic question for all CEOs and floor sweepers alike. What the heck do we do and what do we want to do? In big business there is visioning, missioning, goal setting, target measuring, market analysis, focus groups, policy and much much more, more and more. In small business, we offer far more than we would like to do, but in order to make ends meet, we take on more and more until we finally burn out or are lucky enough to realise a cash flow that will enable us to niche or focus on what we do and what we want to do.
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