Articles

Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.

A Smarter Way of Preventative Maintenance

4 Simple Steps to Improving Profitability through Smart PMs

How did the PM routines come to be in your business? PM routines are often the result of a failure and the maintenance department being told to implement a PM to prevent it from happening again. The PM is hastily put in place without much detail or thought. Fast forward a little ways in time and soon you have a monster of PM program, in which you struggle to execute on time. Overtime increases to complete all of the PMs, yet the performance of the operation does not improve. [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins 2 Comments

Requirements Development and Risk Management

Guest Post by Paul Kostek (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

One of the keys to a successful project is having a set of requirements that are well defined and stable. We’ve all worked on projects where a lack of defined and controlled requirements has led to scope creep which result in schedule delays.

The requirements development process must also include mitigations for the risks identified in the Risk Management Plan. To accomplish this the initial risk assessment must be completed before the requirements development process begins. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Confined Space Entry Safety

A confined space is anywhere not normally meant for human habitation in which access maybe restricted and the conditions in the confinement may be inadequate to support life or could cause engulfment. Obvious places are tanks, vessels, silos and below ground pits. The less obvious ones are cold rooms, areas of plant sandwiched between machinery and equipment, tip truck trays and open pit mines.

Keywords: risk assessment, hazard identification, job safety analysis, safe atmosphere. [Read more…]

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment

Making the Connection

Why do so few product development programs make that connection between the product specification document content and the released product? It seems to be such a common thing that these two don’t connect that organizations don’t even bother to review or analyze this after release.

The mindset at that point seems to be:

We did the best we could with the resources we had
All product change from their original specifications
It transformed into a product that better fits our updated understanding of what could be made to satisfy the market

[Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 7 Comments

4 Different Types of Reliability Testing

Getting the Right Information from Your Reliability Testing

You cannot test in reliability any more than you can test in quality. Often reliability testing is done though, and knowing the range of testing approaches and their associated results will help you get the most information from each test conducted.

Let’s explore the types of testing that generate information useful as you develop a reliable product. There are 4 different types of reliability testing:

Discovery
Life
Environmental
Regulatory

Within each type there are many variations to the testing details and the specific results generated. Understanding the questions each type of testing has the capability to resolve is a good first step to implementing the right set of tests for your project. [Read more…]

by Kevin Stewart Leave a Comment

Characteristic 1 of an RCA Program

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As with other programs, an RCA program needs to be driven from the top and supported through all levels of the organization. This includes upper management, supervision or mid-management, and those on the front line doing the [Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

10 Things an Operations Supervisor Can Do To Improve Reliability

Continuing the series that started with maintenance supervisor and reliability engineers, if you are new to the position of Operations Supervisor, what are some of the things you can begin working on immediately to improve reliability within the area you work? [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic 2 Comments

Are You Driving The Wrong Behaviours?

Use a Balanced Scorecard to Ensure the Right Behaviours are embedded in Your Organization.

This post is the third of a miniseries on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). If you haven’t already, please go back and read the first post on what is a KPI and the second post on leading Vs Lagging KPIs. [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

UAV’s Coming to Your Neighborhood

Guest Post by Paul Kostek (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Here in Seattle we’ve had several interesting incidents/accidents with personal UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) or drones.

In one case a person flew their UAV into the Space Needle, no damage and no one was hurt; at a parade an operator lost control and hit and knocked out a parade attendee and the operator was cited by police; UAV stuck on power lines over a lake, result – power turned off and UAV recovered at a cost of $35K and the operator was not found; and just recently a UAV was flown into the Ferris wheel on the waterfront, no damage to the wheel though a table on a nearby deck was destroyed.

In the first two of these cases the operators were identified and contacted by Seattle Police. No one has stepped forward in the third and fourth, and since the FAA database is not in place yet, the only means to track them may be through the manufacturer. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini 1 Comment

Sizing Liquid Pipelines Easily

Sizing liquid flow pipelines easily. Designing pipe work for liquid flow requires calculating the pressure losses along the pipe due to pipe friction. Once the losses are known the right pipe diameter can be selected. If full engineering calculations are not possible the conservative approach is to select pipe sizes that produce a velocity of less than 3 m/sec.

Keywords: pressure loss, viscosity, friction factor. [Read more…]

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment

The Specialist

I was in a meeting recently with a customer team. It was on-site with 12 people ranging from mid-level engineers to upper management. Someone defended me earlier in the meeting by saying “Well, he did write a book on it!” Which was nice and kinda cool to hear someone say. But this lead to a later comeback by a crusty, principle engineer, 40 years under his belt, boat captain from “Jaws” kind of guy. “If we can buy your book then why do we need you?”

I took a moment. I knew that not responding wasn’t what I wanted to do but had to tread carefully because a poorly crafted response could easily sound arrogant. This is what I responded with… [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 3 Comments

4 Steps to Accomplish HALT

4 Not Always Easy Steps

Highly Accelerated Life Testing, HALT, is a method to discover the weaknesses in a design. Using a step stress approach of single and combined stresses, you can quickly expose the salient weaknesses in your design and/or assembly process.

The value of HALT is it’s quick and often finds problems not previously known. You will destroy one or more prototypes, yet the value of knowing specifically what needs improvement more than justifies the sacrifice of a few photos.

Conducting HALT may be part of your reliability plan. Keeping a few steps in mind will help make sure your HALT does provide value back to your development efforts. [Read more…]

by Dennis Craggs 6 Comments

Telematics Counting Data Analysis

In my prior article, an overview of vehicle telematics was provided. Telematics data includes time stamped records and fields containing count or parametric data recorded from the vehicle CAN bus. The count data is always a non-negative integer and the parametric data is stored as real numbers, generally in scientific format. This article focuses on the analysis of counting data.

Count data is used to monitor events, i.e., the number of trips, the days of operation, the calendar date, door open/close cycles, the number of engine starts/stops, or other variables. So, if a variable is selected for analysis, how can it be analyzed and a vehicle be characterized? How can fleets be analyzed? Can vehicle usage percentiles be determined?
[Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

Guest Post: Why Soft Skills Are the Hardest Skills to Acquire

A Guest Post by Kay Sandberg, Christopher Harding, and Will Wilkinson of Luminary Communications

Remember that first time you were asked to step into a leadership or management role, or to manage a client relationship? The experience was probably exciting and unsettling at the same time. Something different was asked of you.

While many of us have succeeded as individual contributors or team members, succeeding as a leader or manager requires a new set of skills we have often not been given the opportunity to acquire. This applies whether we carry an official leadership responsibility or not. In a future article it would be interesting to explore the distinction between “leader” and “manager”. [Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

The 5 Fatal Mistakes of Customer Service

You would think that anyone who provides a product or service would understand the value of a satisfied customer.

Satisfied customers come back for more, they spread your name around with their friends and colleagues and talk about you in that bright eyed way a teenager talks about their first love. While it would be fantastic if this feeling of mutual admiration could last a lifetime, the reality is in the service and consulting business the average relationship between a customer and a client is somewhere between 5 and 7 years. [Read more…]