Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
People are the heart of any maintenance reliability program and they have the ability to make the program succeed or fail. This is why managing the change to reliability culture is critical. We covered a few of the key pieces to change management in the previous post. But sometimes, not matter what change management technique(s) you use, the change may not be successful. [Read more…]
Transparent vulnerabilities are so obvious that they are easily overlooked; they are the ones we:
Risk and time are opposite sides of the same coin; for if there were no tomorrow, there would be no risk. Growing government intervention in the private sector therefore becomes a transparent vulnerability that we have not accounted for in our identification of vulnerabilities. Time transforms risk. The nature of risk is shaped by our time horizon. In order to achieve corporate goals and objectives time horizons are established few take into account government actions. [Read more…]
What you will learn from this article.
Why don’t you fall to the ground when you sit in a chair? Why doesn’t the roof fall in on top of you? We don’t expect these sorts of things to happen. But at times chairs fail and people fall to the ground and at times roofs fall on people. When structures are put under sufficient stress they will fail. [Read more…]
Systems and processes exist in our dynamic world. Each organization and situation is different. Just as there is not one risk management process that works for any organization, there also is the need for continuous improvement of an existing system.
When first designing a risk management process for your organization, you consider your objectives and adjust a framework to fit your needs. Over time your objectives and the surrounding environment changes, thus requiring a critical look at your process. [Read more…]
If you’ve hung around this site, subscribed to the email list, or followed me on social media, you know that I am obsessed with engineering impact. It is how I close every email and is the focus of nearly every article and post. Heck, my tagline is Engineer with Impact. But what does that really mean? And how do we know if we are doing it?
As engineers, we pride ourselves on the ability to problem-solve. And rightfully so. We are dang good at it! We’ve spent years, if not decades of our lives, honing the craft of working through problem after problem, getting a precise solution. But sometimes we get so focused on solving the problem in front of us that we don’t stop to think if the problem is really…well…the problem. And when we fail to solve the right problems, we fail to Engineer with Impact. [Read more…]
It’s early in the boating season. It’s a beautiful Saturday and wee’re wakeboarding, My wife is driving. I am getting ready to line up to jump the wake and all of a sudden she cuts the throttle and then guns it again. I just let go of the rope and wait for her to come around so I can find out if it was the dirty dishes left on the couch or beard shavings carelessly sprinkled on her face soap. She said the boat just stuttered without her touching the throttle. Hmmm really? As we are talking the boat just stalls. Ughh!, and we are not close to the house.
Over the last several years I have been working on and off with customers to among other things build a maintenance strategy for their equipment that will insure the designed reliability of their assets.
A while back I was asked by one of these customers to come in perform several RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance) analyses on some new equipment that was struggling to deliver the expected/promised production rates. As the team worked its way through the process of identifying failure modes I continued to ask the following questions: [Read more…]
It turns out that you have been deploying the right reliability tools and maintenance practices, but the organization’s culture was preventing or hampering the results. This is a common scene played out in many organizations, but there is hope. The culture change will be a long road, as cultures are not changed overnight. [Read more…]
What you will learn from this article.
Guest Post by James Kline (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
When Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is advocated, it often seems like it is the end all and be all. However, this is not true. It is a methodology which assists management in identifying the risk that can prevent an organization from accomplishing it desired goals. As such, it should be viewed as another management tool in a range of tools. Perhaps the best presentation of this idea, for local government, is from the city of Oshawa Canada. This piece discusses how it has integrated ERM into it continuous improvement process. [Read more…]
In my previous article, we reviewed the project approval committee, and emphasized approval to start projects and/or approve projects in-process.
With any type of project oversight, presentations or project schedules are often reviewed.
“Definition of done” is the agreed-upon evidence of completion of a process, activity or milestone and usually includes a project deliverable. Some examples of deliverables might include the project plan, project schedule, documents (requirements document, plans, and reports), analysis, and designs (drawings). Other considerations can be built-into “definition of done” including compliance, acceptance/sign-off, exceptions and best practices.
How many responses are needed for a survey? This question requires specifying the desired confidence and the accuracy of the survey results.
A Bernoulli trial is an event that has two possible outcomes. Consider the case where the only possible outcomes are success or failure. Let the probability of a success is p and the probability of failure equals q. The probabilities of all possible events must equal 1, so q = 1-p. These relationships are expressed mathematically as
Some leaders mistake “customer focus” to mean they have to serve all of the customers needs or respond to every request from the field. There are multiple needs I have for a vehicle. Because of this I have more than one vehicle. Many manufacturers have tried to make a car or truck that does everything. It often just ends up being a vehicle that is great at nothing. (See Pontiac Aztek)
Know your target. Make goals, make compromises. Don’t commit to high reliability without making sacrifices. Something has to move either it be schedule or new technology development. There are no worse words than a leader saying “…and it must be highly reliable” without discussing the cost of pursuing that reliability goal. Know up front if you are willing to trade reliability for growth of technology or time to market.
Imagine working within (or maybe you don’t need to imagine it) an organization in which everything is completely reactive. You arrive early to try and organize the work for the day, yet only to find out someone else is there doing it. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Greg Caroll (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
So why don’t most Enterprise Risk Management system work? Simply, they don’t “manage” risk, they just record it. Manage is a verb not a noun. It is activity not an item. Making a list might be adequate for those who want to check off regulatory compliance, but it’s does not produce a ROI. [Read more…]
