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The Amazing Power of Sound

The Amazing Power of Sound

Harnessing the amazing power of sound can transform your predictive maintenance program by placing diagnostic tools in the hands of trained operators.

Imagine walking down a production floor and hearing a rhythmic, oscillating sound that is interrupted every third cycle by tick…tick…tick… Would you know something was wrong with the equipment? Would you step closer to the equipment to hear the sound better? Would you escalate the sound to prevent impending catastrophic failure?

Understanding component failure doesn’t always have to rely on expensive diagnostic tools. In fact, one of the most powerful methods we have at our disposal costs nothing: teaching operators to use their five senses at the GEMBA (the place where the work happens).

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Four Important Things You Should Know About Risk

Four Important Things You Should Know About Risk

Risk is a concept human beings invented to help understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Subjective judgments are made at every stage of the assessment process, from the initial structuring of a risk problem to deciding which endpoints or consequences to include in the analysis, identifying and estimating exposures, choosing dose-response relationships, and so on. These are four important things to keep in mind when discussing risk.

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The Evidence is Gone

The Evidence is Gone

The Problem

The call comes in at 2 AM. By 6 AM, the failed bearing has been cleaned, bagged, and set on a shelf. The equipment is back online. The shift crew has gone home. The DCS trend that captured the last four hours before the event has been overwritten by the next shift’s data.

Three days later, someone opens an RCA.

The investigation is already compromised — and nobody did anything wrong. The technicians restored production as fast as they could. The supervisor documented what he saw. The planner closed the work order. Everyone did their job. But the evidence that would have made the investigation rigorous is gone, and the RCA that follows will be built on memory, opinion, and whatever paper trail happens to survive.

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Is Your Spare Parts Problem a Maintenance Issue or a Procurement Issue?

Is Your Spare Parts Problem a Maintenance Issue or a Procurement Issue?

Nobody wants to answer that question honestly.

Ask the maintenance manager and he will tell you procurement moves too slowly, does not understand urgency, and treats a critical spares request like a routine stationery order. Ask the procurement manager and he will tell you maintenance submits requests too late, provides incomplete specifications, and expects three-week lead times to disappear overnight. Both of them are right. And that is exactly the problem.

While the two departments argue about whose fault it is, the plant is down. Production is bleeding. And somewhere in a storeroom that nobody properly manages, the part that could have prevented the whole crisis was either never ordered, already expired on the shelf, or listed under four different names in the CMMS so nobody knew it existed.

This is not a story unique to one plant or one country. It is playing out across manufacturing facilities in Ghana, across West Africa, across the continent, every single week. And until we are honest about where the real failure sits, we will keep having the same conversation every time a critical machine goes down.

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Reliability and Systems Engineering – integration over optimisations

Reliability and Systems Engineering – integration over optimisations

Reliability problems often emerge from the interaction of components, interfaces, operating assumptions and decisions across the wider system.

This is where systems engineering and reliability engineering intersect.

Systems engineering and reliability engineering

Systems engineering is concerned with how elements fit together to deliver capability.

Reliability engineering focuses on how those elements behave over time, under real operating conditions and in the presence of uncertainty.

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RCM Readiness: Building the Foundations Before Optimizing Maintenance Strategies

RCM Readiness: Building the Foundations Before Optimizing Maintenance Strategies

RCM foundations that determine success

Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) has become one of the most respected methodologies for developing maintenance strategies. When properly applied, it helps organizations align maintenance tasks with failure consequences, optimize resources, and improve asset performance.

Yet many RCM initiatives fail to deliver the expected results.

The reason is often not the RCM process itself. The problem is that organizations attempt to perform RCM before establishing the prerequisites necessary for success.

RCM is not a starting point.

RCM is an optimization process. It assumes that the organization already possesses a certain level of asset knowledge, data quality, workforce capability, and organizational discipline. Without these foundations, the outputs of an RCM study become little more than educated guesses.

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Learning From Failures

Learning From Failures

Guest Post by Bill Pomfret (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

“Learning from failure is essential for continuous improvement. It helps us understand the reasons why things go wrong and informs what approaches we can and should take to avoid similar adverse outcomes in the future”.

Nowhere is this more important than in the world of Occupational. & Environmental Safety & Health events, which can cost lives, disrupt operations and result in lasting reputational damage that can stunt business growth. Improving internal capabilities to investigate adverse events helps organizations uncover how they can avoid future losses, maintain compliance, and keep them on a path toward sustainable business performance.

But knowing how to optimize your incident investigations isn’t always clear EH&S expert, Dr. Bill Pomfret, Managing Consultant, with Safety Projects International Inc. and his staff for their thoughts on the key things that organizations should consider when creating an incident investigation program that delivers real results. Here’s what they said. Regarding compliance and keep them on a path toward sustainable business performance. But knowing how to optimize your incident investigations isn’t always clear

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Harnessing the Power of the 5 Senses in Operator Diagnostic Reliability with Case Studies

Harnessing the Power of the 5 Senses in Operator Diagnostic Reliability with Case Studies

The Role of the Five Senses in Operator Diagnostic Reliability

Operators often rely on their senses to detect subtle changes in equipment performance. Each sense contributes uniquely:

  • Sight helps identify visual signs such as leaks, corrosion, wear, or unusual vibrations.
  • Hearing detects abnormal sounds like grinding, knocking, or hissing that indicate mechanical problems.
  • Touch allows operators to feel temperature changes, vibrations, or looseness in components.
  • Smell can reveal burning, chemical leaks, or other unusual odors.
  • Taste is rarely used but can be relevant in specific industries, such as food processing, to detect off-flavors indicating contamination or spoilage.

 

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New Book Release: Agile Hardware Product Realization in the Age of AI

New Book Release: Agile Hardware Product Realization in the Age of AI

Michael Keer, founder of Product Realization Group (PRG), addresses the challenge teams face in moving hardware concepts from promise to successful scale.

Agile Hardware Product Realization in the Age of AI: From Concept to Scale brings together lessons from decades of hands-on experience in Silicon Valley—where misalignment between product, process, and production can be costly. Drawing from firsthand experience with both success and failure, Keer explains what goes wrong in hardware development and why.

One of the central ideas in the book is that many organizations underestimate how difficult it is to move from prototype to production. Even well-funded, highly technical teams can stall when regulatory requirements, documentation, or manufacturing realities catch up with them. The result is often delays, rising costs, or products that never reach the market as intended.

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Reliability Engineering: The Strategic Advantage Behind Every High-Performing Asset

Reliability Engineering: The Strategic Advantage Behind Every High-Performing Asset

In asset-intensive industries, keeping equipment running efficiently, safely, and cost-effectively is a top priority. Reliability engineering plays a crucial role in achieving this goal by ensuring that assets are designed, maintained, and operated to minimize failures and maximize performance. 

A strong reliability engineering program helps organizations reduce downtime, lower maintenance costs, enhance safety, and extend asset life. Whether in manufacturing, energy, transportation, or utilities, companies that invest in reliability engineering gain a competitive advantage by improving operational efficiency and asset performance.

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Strong Diagnosis. Weak Medicine.

Strong Diagnosis. Weak Medicine.

The Problem

The investigation was solid. The logic tree held up. The team identified a real cause — not just a symptom — and documented it cleanly.

Then the corrective action was: “Remind operators to follow procedure.”

This is the corrective action quality gap. It’s the moment where rigorous analysis collapses into a weak response, and the organization quietly accepts that the failure will return. Nobody flags it. The RCA gets closed. The risk stays in the system.

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Four Important Things You Should Know About Monte Carlo Analysis

Four Important Things You Should Know About Monte Carlo Analysis

Monte Carlo analysis is a computer-based method of analysis developed in the 1940s that uses statistical sampling techniques to obtain a probabilistic approximation. Monte Carlo simulation uses thousands of permutations of random variables to generate a probability distribution that can be used to forecast uncertainties and variability. The bottom line is that you may be making reasonable decisions without this type of analysis, but it is nearly certain that you are leaving value on the table if Monte Carlo analysis is not in your toolbox.

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