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Advice to Engineers Thinking of Becoming a Maintenance Consultant

Advice to Engineers Thinking of Becoming a Maintenance Consultant

Here are some truths and hard-won learning for engineers thinking of becoming a Maintenance Consultant, or any other sort of consultant. There are important know-hows covered in this article that you need to understand if you want to build a maintenance consultancy that delivers you consistent cash flow. I could have written a lot more, but there are really only two determinants you must focus on to become a viable consultancy: marketing and innovation. Read about how Lifetime Reliability Solutions Consultants started and what we had to learn to to market ourselves and survive when the business plan turned out to be completely useless.

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College vs Trades: My Mother’s Lesson Changed Everything

College vs Trades: My Mother’s Lesson Changed Everything

At the SMRP Conference, a panel discussion about workforce development — and the value of college versus the trades — reminded me of a lesson I’ll never forget.

When everyone around me said I had to go to college, my mother said something that changed the course of my life forever.

In this story, I share a moment from high school that taught me the power of intuition, trust, and having someone who believes in you enough to say, “It’s okay to wait.”

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Why Reliability Professionals Need a Default Ethical Framework

Why Reliability Professionals Need a Default Ethical Framework

The time for reliability professionals to develop a default ethical framework is before the action occurs. Spend some time studying ethics. More importantly, watch the ethical practices of others in your organization. The great trusted advisors have a default ethical framework. Ethical communication is directly aligned with a reliability professional’s ethical framework.

Ethics are the way we make decisions.

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The Business Skills of a Good Reliability Engineer

The Business Skills of a Good Reliability Engineer

Knowing how to estimate sample size or create a Weibull plot is not enough today.

Just having technical skills, while essential, is not sufficient.

Having a master of business administration (MBA) may be helpful, and it is not required; knowing the warranty and brand cost per failure is essential.

You also need to know which analysis to conduct and how it fits into the larger program and organization, plus how it impacts your customers. You also need to understand the business side of your work. [Read more…]

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The Great Chicago Flood

The Great Chicago Flood

On April 13, 1992, water tore a 20-foot long hole through the wall of a tunnel 20 feet below the bed of the Chicago River, some 50 feet below downtown Chicago. Over 200 million gallons of water surged through an extensive series of underground tunnels, affecting over 30 major buildings including City Hall and the financial markets. Lower levels of major office high-rises held up to 40 feet of water, and the city center was evacuated out of fear that electrical or utility connection failures could endanger lives.

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CEO Disruption

CEO Disruption

Lengthy reigns at the top may be the next thing to get disrupted.
Carol Ryan – Wall Street Journal Writer

What’s the CEOs role in VUCA time? What do you think? According to the Wall Street Journal. “Point people to the light at the end of the tunnel” (Crash Course in Crisis Management, Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2020)

Story: The challenge: some CEOs are unfit for VUCA duty. In other words, they are not ‘VUCA or future-ready’. Take a look at what investors say in the Self Disruptive Leader survey from Korn Ferry (BTW: Pre-COVID:

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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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