Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of articles by:
We hear about ‘poor communication’ so often related to undesirable outcomes, that the term has become somewhat generic in nature. It has become meaningless in terms of implementing corrective action plans to prevent the risk of further miscommunication. How can we act on ‘poor communications’ without understanding what causes such miscommunication? This article will focus on applying key RCA principles to understanding what causes miscommunication. [Read more…]
If we have heard it once, we have heard it a million times – “let’s do an RCA on that failure”. The problem here is that phrase will mean something different to everyone who says it. What is an RCA? That is a question even the notable experts cannot agree on. With all of this RCA “chaos”, how do we make any progress? [Read more…]
Traditionally RCA is only utilized after an event has occurred, so how can one call it proactive? This perception is explored through trying to understand the current paradigms that exist about RCA, what it is and when it is used. Do we really have to wait for an undesirable outcome to occur in order to use RCA? [Read more…]
Foreword By Robert J. Latino: I wanted to dust off this impactful paper written by my father before he passed, and ask for your opinions about how far we have really come in the field of Reliability Engineering, based on your experience?
You are the ones that carry on the Reliability torch today. Based on Charles’ reflections about his Reliability career, how far has your facility come and what hurdles do you still face? [Read more…]
Why do our Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) dictate that equipment is an asset and our employees are liabilities? Don’t our executives always tell us ‘our people are our greatest assets?’ How come our financials don’t support their assertion? [Read more…]
In times that promise to be a financial challenge for many corporations, we must make decisions as to where to invest our scarce dollars and where to cut from our current operations. When faced with these decisions, we must be realistic and pragmatic about how short-term decisions impact our long-term goals. Yes, when times are hard, how well positioned will we be when the economy picks up (and keep the faith, it will pick up)? [Read more…]
Does this paradigm apply at your workplace?:
“We NEVER seem to have the time and budget to do things right, but we ALWAYS seem to have the time and budget to do them again!”
While this article was written for manufacturing many years ago, is it any less applicable today, in any industry?
As I headed to work this morning in my Chevy Silverado Truck, this message appeared on my dash console.
As if there aren’t enough distractions these days built into our vehicles (i.e. – GPS, telephones, use of our various electronic devices, iTunes, Email, Text, etc.), do we really need a warning message to read while driving, that is telling us to focus on the road? [Read more…]
The majority of times that a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is ‘required’ is often due to some type of threshold of pain being met. Someone is hurt, we’ve had an environmental excursion, we lost a lot of money in throughput or equipment damage, we violated some regulation, etc. Essentially, when the ‘suits’ show up, something bad has happened and we will do an RCA whether we like it or not. This is the basis of ‘reactive RCA’, where we respond to an incident that has already met certain defined requirements, often called ‘triggers’. [Read more…]
In last month’s introductory article, we discussed some of the barriers to selling not only the concept of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) but also the recommendations generated as a result of these analyses. We also laid the framework for making better predictions by generating and accessing better data—namely predicting our Mean Time between Failure (MTBF) and Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) earlier and, therefore, implementing a fix faster.
Given this background, let’s explore how we can now justify conducting a RCA and implementing the recommendations as a result of the analysis. By and far, conducting a true RCA is viewed as luxury not a necessity. Think about the objections we hear when we offer the idea of gathering RCA teams. What follows is a list of common objections to RCA accompanied by rational justifications that any manager can employ. [Read more…]
Veteran professionals in the Reliability field view every business as a system. All systems have 1) inputs, 2) a transformation of those inputs in some form or fashion and 3) outputs. Just think about that for a minute; think about your schools, banks, manufacturing plants, small businesses…they are all systems. [Read more…]
Fatigue regulations and guidelines have been long established in aviation, transportation and the nuclear industries (just to name a few). The science is solid supporting the correlation between human fatigue, and poor decision-making/poor responsiveness.
So why aren’t such fatigue regulations required in healthcare as a matter of standard like in other industries? Is there something different about the physiology and/or anatomy of a healthcare worker versus a pilot, truck/bus driver or nuclear operator? [Read more…]
[Editor: originally posted Jan 23, 2015]
For those that are football enthusiasts and looking forward to the upcoming Superbowl, we are intrigued by the recent scandal in the NFL. The scandal involves the allegation that somehow the New England Patriots’ footballs used in the game against the Colts last week, were deflated and did not meet the minimum PSI requirements of the NFL to be ‘legal’ for game use. The allegation involves the possible tampering of the NE footballs to attain that ‘deflated’ state. Conceivably this would make it more desirable to throw and catch in the conditions of the game. [Read more…]
As a key attribute of High Reliability Organizations (HRO), what’s wrong with a questioning attitude? One the surface it would seem like this is something we would encourage all of our employees to do. Certainly they ask such questions because they seek legitimate answers, right? We wouldn’t want to discourage that behavior, would we? [Read more…]
We might be doing a Shallow Cause Analysis (SCA) if … [Read more…]
