Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
A comprehensive reliability engineering program for a new product is a large investment. Not just in dollars, but more importantly, in time. No matter if you are a Fortune 500 company or a startup in your second year, time is always the freight train bearing down on you without mercy. I am going to give you a simple recipe I use for making a highly reliable product when that train horn is blaring and only getting closer. [Read more…]
James Toney has more than thirty years of experience in the quality profession. His clients have included the U.S. Department of Labor, IRS, Federal Aviation Administration, U.S. Navy, Housing and Urban Development, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Health and Human Services. Commercial clients included financial, telecommunications, hospitality, educational, and healthcare organizations.
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The data in Maintenance Management Systems are very often “unfit for purpose”. When asked about why there is an Enterprise Asset Management or Computerized Maintenance Management system, the answer varies. Here are some reasons we’ve heard:
Doing an RCM analysis is only half the battle for successful RCM Implementation. From the beach in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, I share what you can do to get the results you want.
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The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science. – Albert Einstein
In this article, we will discuss how to use brainstorming to enhance FMEA effectiveness, and when (and when not) to use brainstorming.
LNG import terminals in the U.S. follow NFPA-59A and 49CFR193 standards for facility siting. As a part of the siting studies, LNG regasification facilities report thermal radiation exclusion zones and flammable vapor exclusion zones:
RCA and How to Understand the Basics of Component Failure
When performing a PROACT® Root Cause Analysis (RCA) there is a data collection step called ‘Preserve’ (or the PR in the PROACT acronym) which requires the team to collect failed parts, conduct interviews, obtain paper data and positional information after an undesirable event occurs.
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This article discusses five ways to effectively facilitate tree diagrams by conducting pre-session exchanges, asking powerful questions, using exercises that engage, anticipating disruption, and controlling the tempo. The foundations of systems thinking and facilitation apply to tree diagrams because the analysis requires a group to establish the nature of separate and inter-related components.
Facilitation is defined as a structured session(s) in which the meeting leader (the facilitator) guides the participants through a series of predefined steps to arrive at a result that is created, understood, and accepted by all participants.” As provided in the definition, the fundamentals of good facilitation are always essential, including having a structure for developing tree diagrams that include predefined steps and a process for arriving at results that are created, understood, and accepted by all participants.
A tree diagram is a management tool that depicts the hierarchy of tasks and subtasks needed to complete an objective. The finished diagram bears a resemblance to a tree. (American Society for Quality, 2019).
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Resilience has been lost – and it’s our fault. We need to get it back.
As the Covid pandemic transitions to endemic (I am optimistic) we will get back to a “new normal”. No one really knows what the “new normal” will be like (yet), but it’s safe to say that it won’t be the same as the “old normal”.
[Read more…]Companies end rat-race problems fast and get world class reliability by using the simple Plant Wellness Way EAM methodology to slash operational risk and make your plant and equipment world class reliable
How to get a Plant Wellness Way EAM system-of-reliability that ends your Production and Maintenance rat race is shown in the image below. It’s a simple strategy and plan for building a truly effective life cycle asset management system that purposely replaces old production and maintenance rat-race causing systems.
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You wait 15 minutes for people to turn up, call-in, or get on-line. Some may have popped down to Starbucks to get their daily fix of skinny hazelnut caramel latte, or green tea or Evian water. The punctual few chit-chat away about anything and everything except the meeting agenda in case they commit some anticipatory faux pas. Then there are those, particularly the decision makers, who let everybody know that they only have a certain amount of time available; they will need to leave promptly so they won’t be late for their next meeting and with all plausible deniability may avoid decisions and conclusions; but wasn’t that the point of the meeting?
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The geometric distribution is a discrete distribution often encountered in reliability work, which contains some valuable properties worth understanding. Let’s take a look at some of these characteristics.
This model is useful when trying to answer the question, “How many trials are needed to get a particular result?” So, the number of trials is not set initially; we need to figure that out.
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Want to achieve a worthwhile return-on-investment (ROI) from your software? Then it’s important to learn about some of the most commonly underused computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) functions. Many organizations do not use all of the features their preventive maintenance software provides, or don’t use the functions to their full capacity. According to a national CMMS survey conducted by Reliable Plant magazine, a majority of plant maintenance managers feel they aren’t using their preventive maintenance software to its maximum capability.
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An explosion occurred at East Ohio Company’s peak-shaving plant in Cleveland, Ohio on October 20, 1944. 128 people were killed and 225 injured as a result of the incident.
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