Articles

Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.

What If Senior Management Tells You Not to Talk About It?

When senior management tells you not to discuss something with others, the worst move is to confront them. The second worst is silence. The professional approach is alignment. This article describes six proven techniques for understanding senior management’s concerns and providing options for disclosing necessary information to decision makers.

We Are Not Reporting the Client to the Regulators

“I don’t care what you say. We are not going to turn in one of our clients to a regulatory agency,” one of our national technical managers exclaimed.

“Well, I am not licensed in this state,” I calmly stated. “But any of our licensed engineers or industrial hygienists are going to have big problems if the client doesn’t do it first.” [Read more…]

by André-Michel Ferrari Leave a Comment

Using Crow-AMSAA Plots for RCAs

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Overview

A Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a structured approach to identifying the underlying factors that result in the unwanted/unexpected outcomes of chronic or sporadic events. It is a methodic and rigorous process. It also highlights what assets, systems or behaviors need to be modified to limit or eliminate recurrence of similar undesirable outcomes. The fundamental driver is to address, correct or mitigate the root causes that lead to the unwanted event(s) rather than addressing the symptom(s). Bob Latino, a renowned RCA expert, summarizes this concept as “the establishing of logically complete, evidence based, tightly coupled chains of factors from the least acceptable consequences to the deepest significant underlying causes.”

[Read more…]

by Chris Weir Leave a Comment

Supplier Reliability – Shared Responsibilities

Supplier reliability is often treated as something that can be contracted out. When systems fail, the instinct is to point to the supplier, the specification, the warranty, or the contract. In practice, reliability is rarely owned by one party alone.

Suppliers design, build and deliver products, but customers define requirements, operating context, acceptance criteria and support concepts. Reliability outcomes sit in the space between those responsibilities.

[Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Do You Have Enough Data?

To make informed decisions, you need information.

To form conclusions, you need evidence and a touch of logic.

To discover patterns, you need data.

In each of these cases, and others, we often start with data. The data we have on hand, or can quickly gather.

We organize data into tables, summarize data into reports, display them in dashboards, and analyze the results to inform decisions. [Read more…]

by Semion Gengrinovich Leave a Comment

World Trade Center Collapse

On September 11, 2001, terrorists crashed two hijacked commercial jets into the Twin Towers of New York City’s World Trade Center in a coordinated attack on this symbol of American financial power and influence. Remarkably, both towers survived the initial impact of Boeing 767 jets traveling at speeds in excess of 400 mph, and remained standing long enough for most occupants below the impact floors to escape.

The 110-story Twin Towers of the World Trade Center embodied many engineering advances. They were the first major structures to be designed using wind tunnel testing and digital computers, the first to use structural dampers, and, at the time, the tallest ever built.

[Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

What is Enterprise Asset Management?

AN ENTERPRISE ASSET MANAGEMENT SYSTEM UNITES OPERATIONS, ENGINEERING, MAINTENANCE, AND THE SUPPLY CHAIN ACROSS THE ASSET LIFE CYCLE TO MEET CORPORATE BUSINESS OBJECTIVES AND PRODUCE HIGH PLANT AVAILABILITY AT THE LOWEST LIFETIME COST AND MOST OPERATING PROFIT

—

An enterprise asset management system needs asset reliability improvement processes throughout the life cycle that ensure utmost reliability and eliminate the need for maintenance. You can do that with a Plant Wellness Way EAM System-of-Reliability

What exactly is an Enterprise Asset Management System?

[Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Accidents Don’t Just Happen, They are Caused

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

Everyone comes to their workplace with the expectation, and often a clear plan, for an incident/accident-free day. And many times, the day goes just as planned, however 2.3 million people do not return home after work, they are killed by work related accidents and occupational exposures and diseases every single day, this corresponds to over 6000 deaths every single day.

That is only the tip of the iceberg, in addition there are around 340 million occupational accidents and another 160 million victims of work-related illnesses annually, many of which are life changing, not only to the victim, but often for whole families

These events are often sudden; someone or something is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and at that moment, perhaps only a split second, an incident or accident takes place.

[Read more…]

by Joe Anderson Leave a Comment

The Importance of a Strategic Asset Management Plan (SAMP)

Asset management is a critical function for any organization that depends on physical assets to deliver products or services. Whether in manufacturing, utilities, infrastructure, or healthcare, effectively managing assets ensures reliability, efficiency, and cost control. However, managing assets without a clear strategy can lead to inefficiencies, unexpected failures, and wasted resources. This is where a Strategic Asset Management Plan (SAMP) comes into play.

A SAMP is a high-level document that outlines how an organization’s asset management activities align with its business objectives. It serves as a roadmap, ensuring that decisions related to asset acquisition, maintenance, and disposal are strategic rather than reactive. Without a SAMP, organizations risk mismanaging their assets, leading to increased costs, operational disruptions, and lost opportunities.

[Read more…]

by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

Unit 1: Solving the Airline Industry’s Crisis – The Birth of Reliability Centered Maintenance

RCM in a Nutshell | Free RCM Overview Course – Understand the RCM Process, what RCM (really ) is, How to Apply it Properly, and What Can Be Achieved

Welcome to Hartley Whitney, England—a charming town dating back to the 12th century, whose enduring beauty inspires our discussion on Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). In this first unit of our RCM overview course, we explore the pressing issues that gave birth to RCM over 50 years ago in the commercial airline industry. Discover how catastrophic failures led to groundbreaking research, revealing that equipment failure behaves in unexpectedly random patterns, contrary to the then-prevailing belief that failures mainly occurred due to aging. This revelation paved the way for the development of RCM principles, fundamentally changing maintenance strategies to better align with reality. Join me in this picturesque setting as we delve into the history and transformation brought about by RCM.

[Read more…]

by JD Solomon Leave a Comment

The FINESSE Accessibility Checklist Removes a Pervasive Communication Barrier

Accessibility improves clarity for everyone. The Communicating with FINESSE® Accessibility Checklist is a practical tool to make technical presentations and reports accessible to individuals with visual and hearing impairments. The checklist is part of the broader FINESSE framework—an acronym for Frame, Illustrate, Noise Reduction, Empathy, Structure, Synergy, and Ethics—designed to help technical professionals communicate more effectively with senior decision-makers.

Three pervasive communication barriers are accessibility, language, and generational differences. Addressing accessibility is the first big step, and arguably the most important, for knocking down all three barriers.

[Read more…]

by Chris Weir Leave a Comment

Ethics in Reliability Engineering – Practical Dilemmas, not Theory

When people hear ethics, they often think of formal codes of conduct, professional standards, or exam topics. In reliability engineering, ethics is usually much more practical – and sometimes uncomfortable.

Ethical issues rarely present themselves as clear right or wrong decisions. They tend to appear as trade-offs, pressures and grey areas, often under time, cost or schedule constraints.

[Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

The People Skills of a Good Reliability Engineer

Having the technical and business skills is not sufficient to be a good reliability engineer.

You must also work with other people. With your peers, across the management team, with suppliers, contractors, and customers.

The ability to work well with others is often complex and situational. Being aware of a few basic skills will allow you to learn and improve. Prette and Prette define social competence as the social skills:

that meet the different inter-personal demands in the workplace in order to achieve the goals, preserve the well-being of the staff and respect the rights of each other.

A. Del Prette e Z. A. P. Del Prette, Psicologia das relações interpessoais: vivências para o trabalho em grupo, Vozes, Petrópolis, 2001.

[Read more…]

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

Downtime Frequency and Duration

This article is adapted from Chapter 6 of my book, Measuring Manufacturing Effectiveness.

The book examines how manufacturing organizations define and use performance metrics, and how those measurement choices influence decisions, priorities, and behavior on the shop floor and in management. While the chapters are organized as a cohesive framework, each one is written to address a specific aspect of manufacturing effectiveness and can be read independently.

Chapter 6 focuses on a critical but often oversimplified topic: downtime.

Most organizations track downtime in some form, but far fewer distinguish meaningfully between how often downtime occurs and how long it lasts. These two dimensions — frequency and duration — are frequently combined, averaged, or summarized in ways that mask important operational realities.

This chapter explores why separating downtime frequency from downtime duration matters, how each dimension points to different underlying causes, and how failing to distinguish between them can lead to ineffective or misdirected improvement efforts.

[Read more…]

by Semion Gengrinovich Leave a Comment

Instilling Energy Confidence

EPRI: The Electric Power Research Institute

How safe and reliable are America’s electric power plants?

In 1973 the United States Senate held hearings on the lack of research and development in the power industry. In response, U.S. electric utilities dedicated resources to develop a nonprofit center for research—The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). EPRI was mandated with gathering technical experts and members of the electric power industry to work collaboratively on solutions to the challenges of the electric power industry. Among EPRI’s first priorities was an assessment of the reliability of nuclear power facilities with respect to their design, operation, and maintenance.

[Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Link Between Agile and Agility

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

In the previous article in this series, we discussed the difference between Agile and business agility and how Agile 2 addresses some of the omissions and failings of traditional Agile. Both Agile and Agile 2 focus on accelerating digital development; however, the benefits of any Agile approach can be obviated if it is not implemented within an agile management structure. Addressing execution issues, as Agile 2 does, will not be sufficient by itself to get you where you need to go.

Achieving business agility will also require that you reformulate your company into an agile organization capable of increasing the iteration speed of the Strategy-Execution Cycle we presented in the previous article. This article will focus on aspects of what that will look like.

[Read more…]