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10 Keys for Maximizing the Benefits of your SPC Program

10 Keys for Maximizing the Benefits of your SPC Program

Statistical Process Control charts have been called the Voice of the Process.  Progressive manufacturers utilize control charts to “listen” to their processes so that potentially harmful changes will be quickly detected and rectified.  However, not all SPC programs deliver to their highest capability as there are many elements to get right to achieve maximum utility.  Highly effective SPC programs combine technical competencies, such as using an appropriate chart and sample size for the application, with effective management techniques such as enabling operator buy-in and involvement.  This article identifies ten keys that unleash the power of SPC.    [Read more…]

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Why Reliability Professionals Can Frustrate the Hell Out Of Others!

Why Reliability Professionals Can Frustrate the Hell Out Of Others!

I guess I am writing this just as a reality/sanity check to see if it’s just me, or do my peers in the Reliability profession have the same problems I do, communicating with non-Reliability professionals?

If anyone has been in the Reliability game for a long period of time (I am in my 32nd year), we know that Reliability is a way of life and not just a job. So our proactive thinking, involuntarily bleeds over into our personal lives.  [Read more…]

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Business lessons from the European Super League atrocity

Business lessons from the European Super League atrocity

Good business isn’t knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing

(Association) football (or ‘soccer’ in some countries) is the world’s most popular sport. Most professional leagues (especially in Europe) have different tiers of competition where the bottom performers of one tier are ‘relegated’ to the next tier down at the end of each season, while the top performers of each tier are ‘promoted’ to the next tier up. This means that any club could feasibly work its way to the top tier of every league. [Read more…]

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Here’s the Data

Here’s the Data

Ralph Evans was editor of the IEEE Transactions on Reliability from 1969 until 2004. He was a very good editor for my 1977 article, and he used me as a reviewer, because I was critical of BS and academic exercises. Ralph moved to University Retirement Community, Davis, CA. He died in 2013, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6587564. I wish I’d known he lived nearby so I could have visited and argued with him.

Ralph’s editorials [1 and 2] pled, “Data, Data, Oh Where Art Thou Data?” He wrote, “Field-data are largely garbage. I believe they deserve all the negative thinking possible.” “True field-data are wonderful-much better than fancy equations. Unfortunately, they are very difficult to get. Thus data from the field are largely garbage because they do not represent what really happened.” [Read more…]

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The Inner Workings of a Storeroom

What Processes are Required to Make Your Storeroom Run Smoothly

qtq80-UG9PgzIf you have invested the time to layout the storeroom correctly, and gather the right data, you are on the right track to a successful storeroom.  However, if you don’t take the time to map the various processes in the storeroom, and hold staff to those processes, the work is done so far will be a waste.

When processes are mapped and responsibilities defined, the staff know who does what when.  This eliminates unnecessary communication and work, enabling more time to do what is required.  In addition, when all activities are repeated in a consistent way, it allows organizations to evaluate the process and determine better ways of working. [Read more…]

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Will the Arm Fall Off Your Suit if you Pull the Thread? Understanding Correlated Risks

Will the Arm Fall Off Your Suit if you Pull the Thread? Understanding Correlated Risks

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

In my previous post, I asserted that many companies are not good at managing risks and I’ll stand by that statement.  They’re not good at identifying them, poor at pinpointing dependencies, don’t understand the interactions that create or exacerbate risks and fail to actively quantify and evaluate the effectiveness of their risk management programs.  I believe that a number of disciplines should be applied to help address these issues.

Let’s talk about Enterprise Architecture.  No!  Don’t run away.  We’ll keep it at a layman’s level and try to avoid the need to employ an electron microscope to voluminous diagrams of elements of your company’s structure in order to make any sense of it. [Read more…]

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Uptime – Essentials: You need these

Uptime – Essentials: You need these

In the first edition, the second tier of the pyramid was called “control”. Of course the harder we try to control something, the more complex we make things, and the more likely they will go awry. If you have teenage children you can see that very clearly! You want them to learn and mature, but if you try to control how they do it, you will have trouble. Less control, while providing guidelines and advice, and letting them make their choices will work far better. In “Uptime” the emphasis is on successful practice, not control. Control is exercised in how you decide to implement the practices. The practices remain “essential” to your success no matter how you deploy them. The subjects covered in this level of the pyramid have remained much the same throughout all three editions of Uptime but they’ve grown richer in detail, providing more insight, and with emphasis on how tightly integrated they really need to be with each other. [Read more…]

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Measuring Quality Control Effectiveness

Measuring Quality Control Effectiveness

Aside from meeting specific requirements within quality standards such as ISO 9001 and ISO 13485, well-designed quality system metrics can also serve as meaningful indicators of the strengths and weaknesses of your organization’s processes. As a quality manager, I often consider how precisely our quality system objectives and other metrics describe the effectiveness of our quality processes. Certain metrics such as customer-reported DPPM and customer survey results usually serve to indicate your customers’ satisfaction related to quality. As metrics such as these are tracked over time, managers get a general sense of improvement or decline. Composite measures such as these, however, do not discriminate between quality assurance (preventive) and quality control activities. [Read more…]

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t-test Hypothesis Testing for Means with Unknown Variance

t-test Hypothesis Testing for Means with Unknown Variance

In the situation where you have a sample and would like to know if the population represented by the sample has a mean different than some specification, then this is the test for you. In this case, you do not know the actual variance of the population, you just have a sample.

This test is often the second one in a textbook that describes hypothesis testing. It is a useful hypothesis test and applies in many situations as we rarely know the population variance. [Read more…]

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Why FMEA Needs to be Team-Based

Why FMEA Needs to be Team-Based

“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes

In the international FMEA community, one of the hot topics is how much of an FMEA can be automated versus how much needs to be team-based. Some experts say the future of FMEA requires an automated approach, as systems are getting more and more complex. Others say FMEA must always be grounded in a team of subject matter experts, narrowly focused on the highest priority issues.

In this article, I will share my thoughts on why FMEA needs to be team-based, and what elements can be prepopulated or automated.

[Read more…]

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Well Tortuosity

Well Tortuosity

Tortuosity is defined as “something winding or twisted” or “full of twists and turns”.

Well tortuosity is typical of today’s unconventional wells (see Figure 1) and is now acknowledged to result in casing deformation such as collapsed inner diameters (“ovalized casing”). There is also growing awareness among shale operators that excessive tortuosity can predispose the casing to rupture which results in fracturing fluids going into the wrong stages. Rupture occurs in sections which are deformed and therefore more vulnerable to cyclic fracturing pressures, pressure-induced bending, and earth loads. [Read more…]

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Resilience, Resolve, and Reliable Products

Resilience, Resolve, and Reliable Products

The essence of creating a reliable product involves making informed decisions. Informed related to the implications of the various options on reliability performance. Yet, these decisions, made nearly every day during the early stages of a product’s lifecycle are fraught with uncertainty.

There is an approach that instead of making perfect decisions every time, we instead focus on making decisions that allow us and others to learn the necessary information to then make better decisions. [Read more…]

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Relational contracting – a breath of fresh air or something that has always been blowing in the wind?

Relational contracting – a breath of fresh air or something that has always been blowing in the wind?

a breath of fresh air or something that has always been blowing in the wind?

Let’s just say you owned a house with a garden so big that you need someone to look after it for you. So, you find a professional gardener. And (because you have just graduated from a contract management course), you ask your gardener to sign a ‘traditional contract.’

A ‘traditional contract’ means (at least in this post) a contract with hundreds of clauses supposed to cover every possible future scenario. Do you host garden parties and want your gardener to spend 8 hours on your garden in the preceding week? There needs to be a clause for that. What happens if the gardener is sick? What happens if you don’t want the gardener in your garden between 2pm and 4 pm on Tuesdays because you have clarinet practice? What happens if your clarinet practice changes? What if you have 3 feet of snow? What flowers do you want planted in the spring? Our ‘traditional contract’ needs clauses for every scenario. [Read more…]