Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
We just held the Annual Apex Ridge/NEHALT seminar, sponsored by Qualmark. We had a full house again which was great. This year’s seminar was in three sections.
The first section discussed the methodology for balancing reliability with other product goals during a development program.
The second session was on Reliability testing tools and how to use their outputs to steer program decisions and design improvement. The third session was on specialized HALT testing techniques. [Read more…]
Reliability initiatives are implemented to improve a company’s bottom line, period.
Root cause analysis is one of the fastest ways I know to achieve this improvement. My boss used to say “show me the money” because he realized that upper management was driven by ROI (Return on Investment) or ROC (Return on Capital).
You can argue all you want on whether that is good or bad, but it is the way things are. [Read more…]
A Crisis in the Home IT departmentIf you are the head of your home IT department, you may relate to this tale
Last night my wonderful wife Stacy was riddled with angst over the disruption of her binge watching a spy series, a mild crisis with our own IT hardware.
The cause of her disappointment was the failure of our new large screen Ultra High Definition (UHD) Smart TV to deliver a drama series with a reasonable picture and sound quality. [Read more…]
Having visited hundreds of manufacturing plants in the last 15 years, someone recently asked me if there were any traits the most reliable plants all had in common.
I have listed below the top 5 signs of a reliable plant.
The plants that are top performers are clean all of the time, clutter is unacceptable, and the tasks required to keep the plant clean are routine business. [Read more…]
What if you could improve your maintenance department to the point where you increase the efficiency and the amount of work completed of your department by 80%? Would this be something that interests you?
A properly setup and managed Maintenance Planning & Scheduling Program can enable that type of success and enable your operation to plan for profitability.
This type of increase in efficiency may seem farfetched, but it can be achieved. The typical maintenance department operates between an efficiency of 30-35%, with best in class departments operating at 55% or better. What separates these operations? Planning & Scheduling! [Read more…]
If you can’t sell all you can produce, then reducing costs is often the only way to improve margins, but that simplistic accounting perspective is not always the case.
Cost control is often thought to be key to attaining profitability but it the case of maintenance it can get you into trouble.
Cost control can have a big opportunity cost if you don’t take advantage of the opportunities you have. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Geary Sikich (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
I was supposed to be in Boston presenting at “The Disaster Conferences” on 28 January 2015. Well, the weather just put us out to 19 March 2015 for the now rescheduled Boston conference.
I guess that they are still feeling the effects of this week’s blizzard, now named “Juno”; that left Boston with over 24 inches of snow.
According to the Weather Channel Winter Storm Juno pounded locations from Long Island to New England with heavy snow, high winds, and coastal flooding late Monday into Tuesday. The storm is now winding down.
The National Weather Service has dropped all winter storm and blizzard warnings for Juno. [Read more…]
Here are the things to watch out for when you need to fabricate platforms and walkways.
Stairs, walkways, platforms, and ladders are required to be made to the Australian Standard AS 1657-1992. This standard specifies the design requirements and the materials of construction to be used.
Keywords: deflection, allowable load, live load, guard rails, connections, treads. [Read more…]
The term variance is a statistical concept related to the spread or dispersion of a set of data. Second to the mean, it a common value we may calculate.
We find standard deviation easier to understand and use (it uses the same units as the data) whereas variance uses the units squared.
We use variance in quite a few different ways. Let’s review just a few. [Read more…]
Recently there was a power outage, that caused approximately 2,000 homes to lose power during a very cold day. The paper headline read, “All-day outage caused by worn wiring”.
This seems like a reasonable comment and probably like many other newspaper headlines also seems to go a long way to explain what caused the 2,000 homes and business to lose power for 5 ½ hours, and the 300 that lost power for a total of 11 ½ hours. [Read more…]
Today article is one of those off-topic things I just felt compelled to write about. It also has a bit of the sarcasm us New Yorkers are famous for, but I’m betting the other business travelers will be able to relate!
With my work comes travel and in the last 15 years, I have seen a fair amount of the world.
Let me rephrase that, I have seen a fair amount of the world’s airports, hotels, manufacturing facilities, and restaurants.
Along the way, I have met some very good people, learned a whole lot about how different products are made or produced and discovered for myself that no matter where you live, where you grew up, or what you do, everyone still wants the simple things in life: a secure job, a roof over their head, and to be afforded the time to both provide for and enjoy raising a family. [Read more…]
Finding solutions is reliability engineering too.
Have you noticed that finding solutions often requires just the right question, the proper framing of the issue, the query that reveals the problem and solution?
One of the best ways to lead a team and provide a focus on reliability performance is to ask the right questions.
Understanding objectives, risks, and failures is what we primarily do as reliability professionals. We work with teams to achieve or improve reliability performance.
We ask questions. [Read more…]
Conventional consulting approaches begin with assessments to determine your current state of affairs, judge what’s good and bad about it, give it a score, provide a long list of recommendations and then build an improvement strategy based on the outcome.
Strategy development is normally carried out by a select leadership team and then the change is rolled out to lower levels in the organization. This approach has served well for a long time and it is at the outset of almost any major consulting engagement.
It is useful when comparing sites among each other, but is there some sort of award for being best? Usually not. [Read more…]
Building on the Dale Carnegie® Principles from the famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, we can progress to the final set of principles.
Using his key principles as a guide, we can bring about change within our organization.
In the first post, we covered how to build authentic and meaningful relationships. In the second post, we covered how to win people to your way of thinking. In this last post, we will cover what it means to be a leader.
If you haven’t read the previous posts, I strongly suggest that you do, as they build on each other. [Read more…]
Written with assistance from Ben Karel of Fusion Engineering Plastics
Pty Ltd. Unit 1, 7 Dobra Rd, Yangebup WA ph (08) 9494 1004
Welding can join thermoplastic parts together. It can be by melting the surfaces and pressing them together or by extrusion welding with a filler rod.
Several methods of welding are available. Proper manual techniques are critical to success as is the pressure testing of pressure parts.
Keywords: electro-fusion, butt welding, electro-socket welding, hot air gun, melt temperature. [Read more…]
