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Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
This is part of a short series on the common life data distributions.
The Binomial distribution is discrete. This short article focuses on 4 formulas of the Binomial Distribution.
It has the essential formulas that you may find useful when answering specific questions. Knowing a distribution’s set of parameters does provide, along with the right formulas, a quick means to answer a wide range of reliability related questions. [Read more…]
The Plan: Saturday and Sunday was skiing in Vermont with the family, back Sunday night, everyone off to school Monday morning, then to the airport to get to Miami, Tuesday and Wed meetings down there, then fly out Wed night so I’m back to teach classes Thur and Fri here in Boston. Easy Peesie!
Actual: Finish ski trip feel a little “strange” on flight down to Miami, slight chills. Tuesday do meetings just barely, Tuesday night it hits like a freight train, The Flu, or Malaria, Aliens. On Wednesday the freight train had fully passed over me so it stopped and spent Wed backing up over me again. Thursday it went forward again over a pile of human jello. I’m not flying out for the clases on Thur and Fri, or anytime soon for that matter. Just getting home is my mission for the week.
Managing requirements for complex systems can be challenging, however, establishing a hierarchical framework of key questions (answered at each layer of the hierarchy) can be quite helpful.
While some regulatory authorities (such as the FAA) may require various layers of documentation and traceability, this article isn’t necessarily advocating a bureaucratic development process. The process can be scaled based on the complexity of your system, your ability to model it’s (system) design performance and/or based on the amount of product development risk the organization is willing to assume. [Read more…]
How is a manufacturing process determined to be capable of producing parts that meet engineering requirements? Some, like the finish of a gear tooth are critical, while the roughness of a non-contact surface isn’t critical. The critical characteristics need to be identified and checked to determine if the process is capable.
This article defines the analysis concepts and indices.
Process capability assessments (PCA) start during the product development process and continue into series production. Prototype parts are created by a variety of methods, ranging from hand-crafted parts to short term manufacturing in a production intent process under factory conditions. The methods that are closest to series production are the most realistic.
Yet another example of why it’s important to understand the failure modes that make your system vulnerable to complete shutdown. Delta Airlines is learning this lesson the hard way today after having to inform customers around the world that all of its flights would be on hold or even canceled due to a “system wide outage”.
Delta listed the cause for the outage as a power failure near its world-wide office location in Atlanta, Georgia while those at Georgia Power believe it was the failure of Delta’s equipment that caused the power outage.
While each company points the finger at the other, the reality is Delta’s customers around the world are sitting at airports or at home wondering when the problems will be resolved and when Delta will be able to accommodate their travel needs.
There are several reasons why DOE could be used. This video will provide those reasons and provide the support behind it. The reasons are beyond the traditional ideas. [Read more…]
In this article we’ll explore the topic of requirements, and attitudes about identifying requirements before the design work begins.
In my experience, I’ve had design resources literally state “I hope there are no requirements”. (Unconstrained design and no requirements certainly made this designer’s job much easier.)
There are several other reasons requirements are sometimes neglected:
Guest Post by James K. Kline (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)Reputational Risk and ERM
It is estimated that an organization’s reputation accounts for over a quarter of its market value. As such managing reputational risk has become an important issue for C-Suite members. This piece examines the issues surrounding reputational risk and how an Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) approach can help manage this risk. [Read more…]
Life cycle costing (LCC) is a way of analysing equipment purchase choices. If the analysis is done right and all factors are addressed, and the information is good, you would select the item that cost the least amount to own (buy and use) over its working life. This piece of equipment when compared to other suitable items would perform its lifetime service at least total cost to the organisation. [Read more…]
One of the best pieces of career advice that I have ever heard is to treat your career as a company, of which you are the CEO. And like any company, your career will need a guiding principle that will help you stay focused on your purpose. Companies today would not think of operating without a mission statement to guide them. However, too many of us skip this critical aspect of running our own careers. [Read more…]
This is part of a short series on the common life data distributions.
The Birnbaum-Saunders distribution is a univariate continuous distribution. This short article focuses on 7 formulas of the Birnbaum-Saunders Distribution. This distribution was designed to model the Miner’s rule, thus allowing for non-constant fatigue cycles through accumulated damage.
If you want to know more about fitting a set of data to a distribution, well that is in another article.
It has the essential formulas that you may find useful when answering specific questions. Knowing a distribution’s set of parameters does provide, along with the right formulas, a quick means to answer a wide range of reliability related questions. [Read more…]
We have resolved many manufacturing issues. Why do I need DOE to do this? How can we better get to root cause? Each section below contains a 2-minute video to expand on the topic provided.
Design of Experiments is the best tool for resolving problems when our science and experience fails us. Even if we are right, we also need to prove our approach works to others. Today that includes proof with statistical confidence. We need to be efficient to reduce excessive prototypes, scrap and downtime.
A few months back, I wrote a blog resulting from a conversation I had with a group of Maintenance Technicians who were attending the International Maintenance Conference (IMC) in 2011. While the group was enjoying the conference and learning some new things, the general consensus was that they felt they would not be able to apply the tools and techniques they were learning because “management will say they support reliability, but when it comes right down to it, talk is cheap.”
Guest Post by Greg Carroll (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
In my 2013 book Mastering 21st Century Enterprise Risk Management: Firing Dated Practices | The Best Practice of ERM | Implementation Secrets
I quipped “just as the Wild West of the 1890’s had disappeared without trace by the Roaring 1920s, so too will the business world of the 1990s, be long forgotten by the 2020s”. Just 5 years on and not only has the world changed emphatically but the rate of change is accelerating. [Read more…]
