Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Today’s Gremlin – “I’ve got this”, doesn’t cause trouble. In fact, he’s very motivated to keep things running smoothly. He’s good at what he does and he does keep things running. But, he’s a gremlin because he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Sometimes, he is closed to new ideas, thinking he has been there, done that and seen it all, but doesn’t realize that he really hasn’t. What he knows, he puts to good use. What he doesn’t know is where the limitation arises.
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My first job after college was with Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) at which time in the 1960’s the chemical process industries far outstripped that of the rest of the manufacturing industries.
My second job was as a pioneer in the development of the North Sea, the expansion in search for oil and gas, leading in time to petroleum refining, the most hazardous of all offshore rolls at the time, was hookups, which is building the field, which was developed by a single central combined drilling and production platform.
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Maintenance and reliability problems are not new. Our forefathers and ancestors understood the value of smart maintenance and high reliability. They learnt from experience and passed their knowledge down to us through parables, stories, and sayings. The timeless advice of our forbearers on successful maintenance and reliability is as applicable to us now as it has been to every generation since the dawn of civilisation.
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Dear friends, we are happy to release this video. In this video, Hemant Urdhwareshe briefly discusses various concepts such as on maintainability and availability, MTTR, MTBMA, Availability trade off, maintenance time distributions etc.. Hope you find the video useful.
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In this video, George Williams, Founder and CEO of Reliability X, dives into “Direction Setting,” a key component of the Leadership domain in the Maintenance and Reliability Best Practices Framework. Whether you’re leading an entire plant or managing a single department, this building block ensures your team is focused, efficient, and moving toward a common goal.
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Hi everyone! In this video we use Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) principles. Yesterday, we poured the concrete floor for our metal building, and I learned that newly poured concrete faces a unique Failure Mode: Water evaporates too quickly during drying due to normal environmental conditions. This can lead to excessive cracks that compromise the strength of the structure.
In Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM), Step 7—Default Strategies—helps us determine how to manage specific Failure Modes that require unique actions. In this case, the solution is to keep the concrete wet for at least three days, and luckily, Mother Nature is giving us a hand this weekend!
Remember, RCM isn’t just about routine Proactive Maintenance. Sometimes, your equipment may need special, one-time actions or other Default Strategies to manage particular Failure Modes.
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Recall the overall objective of product development is to develop the ‘right product’ and to develop the “product right”. In previous articles, we defined validation as a continuous process throughout product development to establish complete and correct requirements. Consider the following illustration:
Valid requirements represent the voice of the customer and acceptability of the product. Product performance represents the “voice of” the design and process. Product performance outside of spec limits result in defects and rework (it is not the right product to meet customer needs).
Let’s start with the easiest (and arguably, most likely) scenario: A product requirement isn’t known with good specificity. There is pressure to deliver the product to the customer and the customer expects a ‘fully qualified” product. Some validation doesn’t start until testing in the customers environment. [Read more…]
In the last blog, we discussed how to navigate the various mechanical tooling options and the advantages and trade-offs for volume production. We learned that considering factors such as lead times, cost, quality, and control over development processes is essential to selecting the most appropriate tooling option tailored to your specific product requirements.
Now, let’s continue to our next blog series, which will focus on business systems. Business systems are critical for supporting agile product realization, optimizing your processes, meeting regulatory compliance, and scaling your business. So let’s explore business systems strategies, flows, usage throughout the product life cycle, and tips for success.
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A common role during a first assignment as a reliability engineering is to answer a question or accomplish a task. It may help someone to make reliability decisions.
We may be asked, as I was, how long will this new product function during use? The director of engineering wanted to know if the new design was reliable enough to meet the customer’s requirements concerning reliability. He didn’t ask it that way, yet he did have a question that needed answering.
Sometimes we run a batch of tests, conduct failure analysis on field returns, or compare the durability to two vendor subsystems. In each case, there is a question to be answered.
A decision to be made by someone else. [Read more…]
Design for Reliability (DfR) is a critical aspect of the product development process, particularly for electromechanical products where the interplay between electrical and mechanical components can introduce complex failure modes. DfR is a systematic approach to ensuring that a product is reliable over its intended lifespan and under the conditions it will face during use. It involves a variety of techniques and practices aimed at identifying and mitigating potential failure points early in the design process.
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Plant and Equipment Wellness (PEW) is a Physics of Failure based methodology for equipment failure prevention and defect elimination that results in the fewest activities, least resources and lowest expenditure to produce outstanding operational equipment reliability. PEW identifies the necessary business-wide processes and departmental actions an organisation needs to apply to get high plant and equipment availability. With high uptime comes more productivity, higher operating profits, and less capital expenditure.
As much as possible PEW uses simple techniques that can be done by shopfloor people. Most companies do not have large staffs of university trained maintenance and reliability professionals. They have knowledgeable and experienced maintenance practitioners that know their plant and equipment. PEW does not require specialist RAMS software that none but mathematicians can understand, that very few companies can afford to buy or contract, and requires assumptions about the future that are hopeful at best.
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Video Killed the Radio Star…went the 1979 music video byThe Buggles. MTV used this as their first ever video in 1981, but despite the prophecy and MTV’s 40 ongoing years, radio stars aren’t dead. Radio revolutionised popular music, vinyl discs gave us today’s disc jockeys but even though technology evolves it demonstrates that the fittest will survive and not everything will be killed.
Compact cassette started to challenge vinyl in 1963. With the emergence of CDs in the mid ‘80’s, tapes eventually became old-hat. CDs were ousted by flash drives and today ubiquitous access to downloads overshadow almost everything…but vinyl and tapes aren’t altogether dead and buried. People can be branded dinosaurs but sometimes they are just nostalgic; the odd scratch can make music more of a memorable memory…as does listening to cricket or baseball or horse-racing on the radio!
But it’s not just music that’s been influenced by technology. Meetings have also been affected and, with the advent of COVID more and more of us are being exposed to on-line meetings and, of course presentations. But how effective are some presentations in blending audiovisual media, the spoken word and that most important ingredient, people.
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Hi everyone! Today, we’re pouring the concrete floor for our metal building, and it’s a perfect analogy for Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). Just like this concrete forms a solid foundation that will support our structure for decades, RCM isn’t a quick fix or the program of the week. It’s about building a lasting foundation for your reliability efforts.
RCM takes time, the right people, and a commitment to the process to develop proactive maintenance tasks that truly make a difference. Build for the long term—invest in RCM and lay the groundwork for future reliability!
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Dear friends, we are happy to release our video on this important topic of reliability block diagrams! In this video, Hemant Urdhwareshe explains basics of series and parallel logic in RBDs. Hemant also explains application of Bayesian theorem and conditional probability to estimate reliability in special cases. Hope you find this useful and interesting!
[Read more…]“Risk analysis is the art of turning uncertainty into actionable insight.” — Anonymous
In this article, I will outline how to evaluate an FMEA against the FMEA Quality Objective for Technical Risk Analysis.
By definition, “risk analysis” is “the systematic process of identifying, evaluating, and estimating the levels of risk involved in a situation, process, or system, in order to inform decision-making. [Read more…]
