Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
“Technical” reliability engineering is “quantitative”. This implies that the benefits of improvement measures (e.g.: design changes or alternative maintenance strategies) can be quantified in terms of system performance parameters. Refer, for example, Figure 1.
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“Preventing process accidents requires vigilance. The passing of time without a process accident is not necessarily an indication that all is well and may contribute to a dangerous and growing sense of complacency. When people lose an appreciation of how their safety systems were intended to work, safety systems and controls can deteriorate, lessons can be forgotten, and hazards and deviations from safe operating procedures can be accepted.
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Have you ever wondered what some leaders and ghosts have in common? Well, I will get to that, but let me paint you a picture. You have been told to start improving the storeroom, so you start by analyzing the performance, identify gaps and finally develop a plan to make the improvement. You share this improvement plan and business case with the senior leadership of the site. You get a resounding “Let’s do it” across the room. You leave super excited to start the improvement journey. As you start implementing the improvements, you run up against multiple barriers, such as finance not willing to write off obsolete parts or sell them back to the supplier for a discount. The storeroom staff “don’t have time” to assist with the cleanup or the data analysis. Since the storeroom doesn’t directly report to you, you talk to their manager, and the manager says their staff are too busy. You go to discuss the barriers with the project sponsor and leadership team, and they are still behind the project. Yet, they don’t go out and talk to the staff, nor do you hear about the project anywhere in the facility. So where are these leaders? They are a ghost to the project. [Read more…]
A lot of people mistakenly think that maintenance scheduling is maintenance planning. They are not the same. There is a big difference between the two functions. The job description might say Maintenance Planner and Scheduler, but in reality they are two roles. Maintenance Planning needs to be done before you can do maintenance scheduling. One person may be tasked with the maintenance planning and scheduling functions, but each has its own duties and responsibilities.
First comes maintenance planning, and then you do maintenance scheduling. A maintenance work pack must be developed and completed in full first, so that comprehensive scheduling can be done using the work pack.
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Digital transformation for huge potential business benefit uses the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) combined. Like any technology or tool, they must be used correctly or the results you want will be elusive.
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In the previous article (Enabling Agile Enterprise Risk Management Part II: Disciplines) I identified the disciplines necessary to enable you to transform your enterprise at speed. At the conclusion of that article, I promised to present a design for a repository and system to support AERM. This article will fulfill that promise.
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Bob Butler nuclear engineer, musician (www.pleasantonband.org), former city councilman and Mayor of Pleasanton, California died October fifth https://www.pleasantonweekly.com/news/2021/10/14/what-a-week-remembering-bob-butler-former-pleasanton-mayor-and-councilman. He helped me get traffic counts data from the Pleasanton Traffic Department.
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Have you ever heard that Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is just for maintenance? Join us for recorsed session done on Monday, October 4, 2021 at 9:00 am Central/3:00 pm London. Chris James will debunk this common misconception about RCM!
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Most successful engineers, analysts, programmers, and other types of makers of products and services will, at some point in their career, encounter a crossroads where they can either continue making, engineering, and programming, or they can begin managing those who do.
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“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” – Stephen Covey
A good listener tries to understand thoroughly what the other person is saying. In the end the listener may disagree sharply. However, before voicing disagreement, the active listener wants to know exactly what the other person is saying and why. [Read more…]
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics data released in December of 2020, 5,333 Americans died on the job in 2019. While 40% of these deaths were cause by transportation incidents and 15% were attributed to workplace violence, nearly 2400 on the job deaths were a direct result of one of the following causes;
· Falls, trips or slips
· Contact with objects or equipment
· Exposure to harmful substances or environment
· Fire or explosion
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I have been very involved recently with ongoing LI discussions with respected and noted experts in the Safety community, revolving around the perceptions those in Safety have of Reliability, and vice-versa.
In Safety today, there are ‘new’ approaches emerging being lead by noted Safety researchers like Sidney Dekker, Erik Hollnagel and Todd Conklin. Such ‘new’ approaches are being labeled Safety Differently, Safety II, Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), Resilience Engineering and a few more.
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In the previous article I discussed product design in general and the importance of leveraging materials engineering to design components that meet performance and reliability requirements at low cost. Both component form and materials can and should be engineered to optimize a component’s design.
In this article I discuss a component design process that explicitly includes materials engineering considerations. This process involves consideration of all design requirements and cost. Not just designing for reliability. That’s where selecting materials gets tricky – having to consider different sets of requirements and design for ease of component fabrication and joining.
