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What Does it Mean to be ‘Safe’?

What Does it Mean to be ‘Safe’?

So what does it mean to be ‘safe’? Is a company ‘safe’ because they have not had an OSHA recordable injury in say over a one year period? Does that mean they will continue to be ‘safe’ in the next year? Does it mean they are at a higher risk of an incident in the near term, because they weren’t safe…but lucky? These are the debates I read about online and as an outsider, I can see both sides. But there has to be a practical middle ground as Safety and Reliability depend on each other for their individual successes, they are interdependent.

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Five Ways to More Effectively Facilitate Failure Modes & Effects Analysis (FMEA)

Five Ways to More Effectively Facilitate Failure Modes & Effects Analysis (FMEA)

This article discusses five ways to facilitate failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) more effectively 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 failure modes and effects analysis 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 an FMEA that includes predefined steps and a process for arriving at results that are created, understood, and accepted by all participants.

Facilitating Failure Modes and Effects Analysis

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The Statement of Requirements

The Statement of Requirements

 Your team has put together the Statement of Requirements (SoR) for the new completion tool wand it contains the target ratings. But the product must have a 10-year minimum service life at maximum rated operating conditions. And reliability expectations are high. Also, the product has electromechanical content and must have operational redundancy and allow contingency operation. However, there are no requirements for these in the SoR. 

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Preventive Maintenance Planner Shows Preventive Maintenance Schedule

Preventive Maintenance Planner Shows Preventive Maintenance Schedule

A Preventive Maintenance Planner Shows When Preventive Maintenance Jobs are Due to Be Done

Preventive Maintenance is the replacement of equipment assemblies and parts which have aged from the normal wear and tear of use. It is a good idea to show people well in advance on a wall planner calendar what dates the work is scheduled to be done.

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What is Risk Management?

What is Risk Management?

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

Asking ‘what is risk management?’ often gets you the trite answer ‘it’s the management of risk’ or we get a list of activities associated with risk management. Neither result is satisfying and we need a better definition that explains the intent of risk management along with some clarification of what this is and is not. Here, I’ve presented some initial ideas on a definition along with four components that should give us a more thorough definition. 

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Communicate Performance Measures Effectively

Communicate Performance Measures Effectively
Do those that manage the performance, understand the measures?

This article is authored by Leonard G Middleton

As noted in other articles, performance measures are used to drive behaviors to make positive organizational changes in support of the organizational strategy and goals.  However how well the performance measures may be developed and defined, if they are not effectively communicated to those individuals whose behavior is important to achieve the strategy and goals, then the performance measures have little value.

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How to Choose Proactive Maintenance Strategies

How to Choose Proactive Maintenance Strategies

When it comes to our machines, we can do Condition-Based Maintenance and Preventive Maintenance in addition to other actions such as No Scheduled Maintenance or equipment redesigns. With those options available to us, how do we choose what to do and when to do them? This is a great strength of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). RCM helps us to identify the right maintenance to do and how often to do the maintenance tasks. For example, should a Scheduled Replacement task or a Condition Based Maintenance be implemented? Join me as I share how RCM can help us develop the right Proactive Maintenance so we can achieve the Reliability we need.

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4 Ways Of Cutting Maintenance Costs That Won’t Impact Asset Reliability

4 Ways Of Cutting Maintenance Costs That Won’t Impact Asset Reliability

Physical assets require continuous maintenance throughout their useful lives. That makes allocating and tracking maintenance expenses a necessity for companies. Maintenance cost is any expense that facilities incur while keeping assets in good working conditions. Typical maintenance costs include:

  • Amount spent for procuring spare parts or replacement components.
  • Cost of purchasing or leasing maintenance tools.
  • The amount for procuring and maintaining digital maintenance tools.
  • Wages for maintenance staff.
  • Costs associated with inventory management.

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Why Production, Maintenance & Reliability Are Critical to Each Other’s Success

Why Production, Maintenance & Reliability Are Critical to Each Other’s Success

Author: Mark Latino

Oftentimes, Production may not know the value of using Reliability tools such as Opportunity Analysis (OA) and Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to gain more consistent predictable production runs.

Most production leadership has never spent time in Maintenance and/or Reliability roles; therefore, they see a different big picture. The pieces of the big picture are interconnected like a puzzle and most production people see the puzzle assembled one way, while the Maintenance and Reliability people see the puzzle assembled another way.

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Five Ways to More Effectively Facilitate Root Cause Analysis

Five Ways to More Effectively Facilitate Root Cause Analysis

This article discusses five ways to facilitate root cause analysis (RCA) more effectively through conducting pre-session exchanges, asking powerful questions, using exercises that engage, anticipating disruption, and controlling the tempo. Root cause analysis requires systems thinking because most failures involve a is a collection of interrelated or interacting parts, including physical equipment, humans, and interactions.


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.” The fundamentals of good facilitation as provided in the definition are always essential, including having a structure that includes predefined steps and arriving at results that are created, understood and accepted by all participants.

Facilitating Root Cause Analysis

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Subcontractor Risk is a Major Reason for Project Failures

Subcontractor Risk is a Major Reason for Project Failures

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

Studies show that the majority of companies today outsource up to 60-70% of their work scope to subcontractors to stay competitive. As a result, subcontractors are a major source of risk to a project.

How to minimize the subcontractor risk on a project is addressed in this paper. The approach to do this is based on my 30 years of project and project risk management experience and knowledge.

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How to Calculate Replacement Asset Value for Assets and Equipment Purchased in Foreign Currency

How to Calculate Replacement Asset Value for Assets and Equipment Purchased in Foreign Currency

When calculating the replacement asset value fo items brought overseas, factor the effect of the difference in exchange rate into the calculation.

Ahmed asks:

How can we calculate replacement asset value (RAV) of a plant? We have 100’s of equipment in our three plants and we cannot contact 100’s of Vendors to tell us today’s equipment value. We have only the Capitalization Cost or installed historic value of assets.

The oldest plant was installed 6 yrs back (Aug 2015) for a total plant or asset value in our accounting record of 10 MMPKR. When the plant was installed 1 USD = 100 PKR and now after 6 yrs the exchange rate is 1 USD = 172 PKR. We took the capitalization cost of 10 MMPKR and calculated replacement asset value at today’s worth as 10 * 172/100 MMPKR.

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Credible Reliability Test Planning

Credible Reliability Test Planning

How to allocate subsystems’ MTBF requirements with testing? Name-withheld-to-protect-the- guilty proposed “Top-Down” reduction in subsystem MTBF requirements; the more subsystems (in series) that you test, the lower the subsystem required MTBF! “The correct formula is

1/MTBF(subsystem requirement) = 1/MTBF(system requirement) –
((# of subsystems in series – # of subsystems tested)/MTBF(subsystem).”

This “Top-Down…” method is uncited and not found in Internet search. 

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