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Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.

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Reliability Block Diagrams Introduction

Reliability Block Diagrams Introduction

Reliability Block Diagrams are a powerful reliability analysis tool. They are visual representation of reliability and risk that exists within machinery or work processes.

They allow the user to notate the reliability of each part or task and calculate the reliability for the whole scenario. The use of Reliability Block Diagrams extends to all aspects of operational processes and procedures, both as series and parallel arrangements.

Once a Reliability Block Diagram is created, you can do “what-if” scenarios to identify the defects that can happen to each part. This information allows you to then make informed decisions about to how to proactively eliminate the causes of each risk or defect, and by extension, eliminate that cause of failure.

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Why Your Assets Aren’t Delivering Value — And How SAMP Fixes That

Why Your Assets Aren’t Delivering Value — And How SAMP Fixes That

Is your maintenance team constantly firefighting while leadership demands results? You’re not alone. Most organizations struggle to connect their business goals to the assets they rely on every day. That’s where the Strategic Asset Management Plan (SAMP) comes in. In this video, we break down the second building block of our asset management domain in the MRBP framework: SAMP Learn how to:

  • Align asset care with business outcomes
  • Identify critical assets and processes
  • Build a structure that supports long-term value
  • Simplify the chaos of maintenance and reliability

Stop guessing. Start managing with purpose.

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Proportional Hazard Reliability Deterioration? 

Proportional Hazard Reliability Deterioration? 

Broom” charts are reliability function estimates from different or successive production cohorts. Their differences may contain actionable information. How to quantify and use that information? This article provides an alternative to traditional Duane, AMSAA, and Crow reliability growth models, based on Cox’ proportional hazards model for test or field reliability data. This article provides:

  • Broom charts that show reliability growth or deterioration
  • Reliability growth references, including credit to my UC Berkeley professors
  • Proportional hazards (PH) model(s) of reliability growth with vs. without lifetime data
  • Suggestions for what to do about reliability deterioration

Suppose successive test samples or production cohorts have reliability growth or deterioration, caused by TAAF (Test, Analyze And Fix), configuration, environment, stress, or vendor changes, or ??? Suppose product cohorts have “proportional hazard” functions. 

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Diesel Generator Stress

Diesel Generator Stress

On August 12, 1983, the crankshaft of one of the three emergency diesel generators at the yet-unopened Shoreham Nuclear Power Station snapped during testing. Inspections revealed cracks in the crankshafts of the two other diesels as well as other defects. Permission to perform low-power tests had been granted before the failure of the crankshaft, and two more years of subsequent analysis passed before permission was again granted. By the late 1980s, a conflict over the emergency evacuation plan was still delaying an operating license for the plant.

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Availability: Can the Equipment Run When Scheduled?

Availability: Can the Equipment Run When Scheduled?

My new book titled Measuring Manufacturing Effectiveness develops a practical framework for understanding manufacturing effectiveness through the lens of performance metrics including how they are defined, how they are interpreted, and how they influence real operational behavior.

Chapter 5 turns attention to the first of the three components of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE): Availability.

Availability addresses a deceptively simple question: Can the equipment run when it is scheduled to run?
Behind that question sits a wide range of losses related to downtime, changeovers, failures, maintenance practices, and scheduling decisions.

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The Technical Skills of a Good Reliability Engineer

The Technical Skills of a Good Reliability Engineer

The fundamental technical skills, as I see it, have to include statistics and root cause analysis skills. This skill set is one of three broad areas introduced in the article, What Makes the Best Reliability Engineer?

I would say these are the minimum technical skills for a good reliability engineer. Able to calculate sample size requirements, understand a dataset, and correctly determine the root causes of a failure. [Read more…]

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New Work Worlds

New Work Worlds

There are lots of lessons to learn from Amazon. Never stop innovating or questioning the fundamentals of your business. Disrupt yourself before others do.
Brad Stone – Journalist & Author

Consulting firms, academics, and consultants are developing Future Of Work models. Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) developed a scenario called the Future of Work: A Journey to 2022. The premise of the study is: “disruptive innovations are creating new industries and business models, and destroying old ones.” (‘The Future of Work: A Journey to 2022’, PwC, 2014).

 PwC outlined three distinct worlds of work: Orange, Green, and Blue.

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Your Best Enterprise Asset Management Strategy is to Walk an Hour Every Day

Your Best Enterprise Asset Management Strategy is to Walk an Hour Every Day

How You Look After Your Body Is A Tell-Tale Of How You Look After Every Other Physical Asset

The Care and Conditions You Give to Your Body Show the Values and Principles You’ll Use On Your Organization’s Physical Assets

The ancient Egyptian saying, “As above, so below. As within, so without” contains much truth. What you create outside of you comes from inside of you. Which implies if you want to have a particular thing it’s necessary to first create the capability inside of you. To achieve your goal by any other way is due to random luck.

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Revealed! The Overlooked Power of Failure Effects in RCM

Revealed! The Overlooked Power of Failure Effects in RCM

What makes Failure Effects so powerful in Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)?

In this video, I dive into step four of the RCM process: writing Failure Effects. I explain how these “little stories” of what happens if we do nothing to predict or prevent a failure mode are essential for assessing consequences—whether they impact safety, the environment, operations, or have non-operational consequences.

I also share a real-world example from the nuclear industry, where identifying specific operating restrictions in a failure effect uncovered an opportunity to improve reliability by rethinking how procedures impact operations.

Writing failure effects isn’t just about documenting failure—it’s about uncovering opportunities to improve your reliability.

[Read more…]

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How Reliability Engineers Can Effectively Communicate Asset Life

How Reliability Engineers Can Effectively Communicate Asset Life

Communicating “asset life” is far harder than it looks. The term sounds universal, yet accountants, engineers, and operations leaders often mean entirely different things when they use it. When organizations fail to reconcile them, capital plans become unrealistic, maintenance strategies drift, and leadership loses confidence in the numbers. When we communicate asset life clearly and contextually correctly, we create shared understanding and decisions that hold up in the real world. 

Summary of Asset Life in Plain Terms

The goal is to see why each life exists and integrate them into decisions.

  • Mean life is statistical and shows inherent reliability.
  • Useful life is accounting-related and guides financial recovery.
  • Service life reflects operational reality. 
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The Magic Math of Meeting MTBF Requirements

The Magic Math of Meeting MTBF Requirements

Recently heard from a reader of NoMTBF. She wondered about a supplier’s argument that they meet the reliability or MTBF requirements. She was right to wonder.

Estimating reliability performance a new design is difficult.

There are good and better practice to justify claims about future reliability performance. Likewise, there are just plain poor approaches, too. Plus there are approaches that should never be used.

[Read more…]