Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
We have executed and coached many projects. What benefit did they provide? Where can we help within the lifecycle of a project? Each section below contains a 2-minute video to expand on the case study topic provided. [Read more…]
One of the most common mistakes I see at plants and manufacturing facilities around the world is centered on the lack of a good lubrication program. For whatever reason, the task of lubricating equipment in most companies has been traditionally viewed as menial but necessary and delegated to low skill level employees with little or no training in lubrication best practices. It is this type of thinking that results in the unexpected failure of rotating equipment, including, pumps, motors, gearboxes, and bearings. Worse yet are the companies that have no lubrication program at all and somehow believe that someone in the plant will lubricate the equipment when it needs it. Just leave a few grease guns and some oil drums around the site and people will know when to add some. [Read more…]
What if an FMEA recommended action is redundant with the Design Controls? A reader makes this observation about an earlier article, and asks the question about the value of redundancy in FMEA.
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”
Eugene Ionesco
Wouldn’t it be great if we could require the stock market to provide us 15% increases in our portfolio every year…or if we could simply require a sunny day for a picnic?
You might be familiar with the term ‘market requirements’ or a ‘market requirements document’ as a deliverable in the definition phase of a product life cycle process. To understand why market requirements don’t really exist, we must first provide the definition of a requirement. [Read more…]
A topic that often comes up lately is high turnover, especially the perception that this is common and desirable among millennials. Born in the mid eighties, I am right on the cusp between millennial and Generation X, and I am one of the aforementioned employees with a high turnover history. A specialized Reliability Engineer with nearly ten years of work experience, I have rarely stayed with a company much over two years. I never intended to be a person who moved between companies so regularly, it just kind of happened. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Geary Sikich (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
We are enamored by risk models, mathematic algorithms, equations and formulae. As a matter of fact, we have become so enamored by complex mathematical algorithms, formulas, models and derivatives that we have abdicated much of the analysis of risk, to these complex formulas and quantitative analysis methodologies touted by firms far and wide. Where has this gotten us? Are we better able to predict and measure risk exposures? Are we managing risk more effectively? [Read more…]
Static electricity is the build-up of opposite polarity (positive and negative) electrical charges on two different substances in contact by the movement of one surface across the other. The spark that can occur from static build-up is the result of the opposite charges neutralising themselves when the electrical field between them becomes strong enough to overcome the gap resistance. [Read more…]
This is part of a short series on the common life data distributions.
The Lognormal distribution is a versatile and continuous distribution. It is similar to the Weibull in flexibility with just slightly fatter tails in most circumstances. It is commonly used to describe time to repair behavior. This short article focuses on 7 formulas of the Lognormal Distribution.
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…]
An executive asked me how to make a “perfectly reliable product.”
I told him that program would look a lot like an embarrassing market failure that could put a company out of business.
This was not the response he was expecting. I chose to elaborate before he just walked away.
The investment of time, dollars, and man power to create a “perfectly” reliable product would force such a compromise on all other aspects of the product and program that any type of market success would almost be impossible. I can only think of two types of products that could benefit from an approach of creating perfect reliability. The two I am thinking of are the Mars Rover ‘Curiosity” and a nuclear power plant. The desire for “perfect reliability” would be driven by either an avoidance of massive loss of life (not just a few lives) or loss of billions of dollars by a single failure mode.
Engineers solve problems. We optimize solutions.
Engineering starts with a question. The work of engineering is answering those questions. Can we create an antenna with enough range? How can we make a safe autonomous driving car? How much can a delivery drone carry if it has a range of 100 miles?
Reliability engineers are no different. We ask questions and work to answer them. To solve the problems in the pursuit of providing our customers reliable solutions.
In general, there are only a few types of questions a reliability engineer addresses: What will fail, when, and what is the impact of a failure.
The answers are used to design reliable products, optimize supply chains and assembly processes, refine warranty accruals, and identify significant business risks. [Read more…]
There are many approaches to managing projects. What are the keys? How can we ensure our critical project is going to meet schedule and customer needs? Each section below contains a 2-minute video to expand on the topic provided.
Is action always required on high-severity issues? What if severity is high (9 or 10 on a severity scale of 1 to 10), and the occurrence and detection rankings are both low? Is action still required? This problem, as well as a challenging problem involving fail-safe strategies, are the subject of this problem-solution article.
Given our primary goal of developing a profitable product, our objective in the design process is to maximize customer value and minimize cost. From a financial analysis standpoint: we pursue products with the highest possible margins (ie. charge the customer “as much” as possible, and make the product for “as little” as possible). Of course we also want to sell “as many” as possible. [Read more…]
Accounting decisions can greatly affect maintenance costs. Two examples are the decision to purchase items as maintenance or capital and plant item asset numbering.
Maintenance costs are expensed in the financial year incurred and are claimed as a tax deduction at the company tax rate (soon 30% in Australia) in the year they are spent. Capital expenditure, on the other hand, is depreciated and can only be claimed as a tax deduction over the usable life of the equipment. Depending on the industry, the depreciation rate for industrial equipment is 20% per year. It can be as little as 2.5% per year for office buildings. There is a clear tax advantage to claim as much expenditure as possible as a maintenance cost and not a capital cost. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Geary Sikich (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
From financial crises to energy catastrophes to earthquakes and threats of terrorism, we hear a lot about events that challenge our ability to identify and manage risk. Unfortunately, some of the things that emerge from many of these events are reactive regulatory rules and requirements. [Read more…]
