Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
One excellent starting point of the investigation phase of a root cause analysis is the comparison of the product measurements to the available process data. With an effective traceability system, you can define a relatively short time range in which the defective parts were manufactured. Once these “fence posts” are identified, use them to examine the available process data such as the recorded pressures, temperatures, times, and speeds. [Read more…]
When it comes to product development, most technology companies understand the importance of reliability. In particular, the engineering teams usually have everything they need to design a reliable product, including the right testing tools and analysis methods.
At times, though, there can be problems. A product doesn’t ship on time. Or if it ships on time, it fails in the field.
I’ve spoken with a few of my customers over the past couple of weeks, one who happens to be in the food business was cranking and working overtime to meet the increased demand that resulted from folks stocking their homes, the other two were labeled non-essential and were preparing to shut down for the foreseeable future. [Read more…]
The flow chart is a method to scope a process and gain agreement on conversation context. There are different approaches to creating them. Get an overview here and determine if it can help with your next situation. [Read more…]
Who really is our customer? Does your organization have a master: partner supplier relationship or a partnership relationship?
Consider that a customer regularly buys our goods or services. For operations/production to be our customer, then they would be paying maintenance for its service. Do they? In some organizations, this may be the case, but is it that way in yours? [Read more…]
In 2004, The Home Safety Council completed the most comprehensive study ever done of the severity and causes of home injury in the United States. Not surprisingly, the rates of injury are highest among young children and older adults. While there are literally millions of home hazards that exist, the study was able to separate out the five leading causes of unintentional home injury. These five leading causes are:
This article focuses on carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a poor furnace ventilation system. [Read more…]
Data is the most valuable commodity in today’s world, and it is no different in reliability engineering. As one of the emerging trends in maintenance space, data plays a critical role in implementing an effective RCM strategy. It is powered by an organization’s ability to integrate multiple data sources into one seamless platform designed to disseminate actionable insights from that data to its decision-makers at the right time.
This is our fifth article about the 3 ways to do reliability allocation. We have been taken on a journey through the reliability design cycle, key steps for reliability allocation, allocation factors used to get these goals and key pitfalls. Now we finish off our conversation by looking at a few variations and applications. Allocating MTBF (… though we recommend against it), allocating availability, allocating maintainability (… another thing we recommend against) and allocating for different system reliability goals.
If you want to finish off your understanding of reliability allocation – read this!
Recently, I’ve been looking back over my career and trying to understand why so many companies struggle with their reliability programs. The processes, the technologies, the tools have all been around for a long time and yet we don’t succeed.
The reason we don’t succeed is poor leadership. [Read more…]
Vilfredo Pareto is credited with the Pareto Principle, and thus the Pareto chart. He is NOT my uncle, but many assume he could be! He was an Italian economist, and I do have Italian heritage. The chart allows prioritization to happen, considering the 80/20 rule, or Pareto Principle. We cannot do everything, so where do we start? This is one way to make that choice. [Read more…]
Most of my career was spent with the Department of Defense (DOD) industry. The many programs I worked on included a fairly difficult reliability requirement. I was taught that reliability is designed into a system. I learned that verifying a reliability requirement was done by analysis. But for the system reliability to succeed, you need to consider the manufacturing and installation of the system. This is when risk management comes into play to ensure system reliability requirements succeed. This paper explains why. [Read more…]
Anyone who has worked around the fields of reliability or quality has certainly bumped into “standard deviation” – a statistic that measures the dispersion within a group of data. [Read more…]
Usually, this newsletter comes out first thing on Monday mornings. Today, it’s late. It’s late because I didn’t get it done last week. It’s late because I stayed off my laptop all weekend. [Read more…]
Concept development and selection is critical for New Product Development. Approaches vary, so what should you do? The video helps you consider your situation and how to blend an approach for increased chances for project success. [Read more…]
I am convinced that our egos often get the better of us. We suffer as a result and so too do those around us. Believing that we have the answers to all of our problems reflects just how much we fool ourselves. Maintenance managers burn out because of it.
Let’s say you are a plant general manager in a facility that is under-performing or not quite achieving the performance improvements you want. Often that can occur because of machinery and system failures that half output, sometimes for long periods before they can be repaired. Once those are corrected you breathe a sigh of relief, thank your maintenance manager for the repair achievement, and ride your production or operations manager to “catch up” on whatever output was lost. [Read more…]
