Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
When spares cannot be purchased easily it becomes necessary to manufacture your own.
Local fabricators, foundries and machine shops can often make the item if you provide them with a design and specification.
Keywords: casting, reverse engineering, metallurgy, original equipment manufacturer, second hand. [Read more…]
Confidence intervals (CIs)provide a means to judge point estimates based on a sample from the population.
If that statement excites you, you may well have the makings of a fine statistician.
CIs are a form of internal estimate and specify a range within which a parameter may reside. CIs helps us evaluate the trustworthiness of point estimates. [Read more…]
Welcome to part two of my 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance. To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles, I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital intensive industry.
Any organization is nothing more than an extension of the people who make it up. It stands to reason that we need to focus on people if we want our organizations to thrive and change. Without your people nothing happens. They are the most important part of your business. If you want excellence your people need to choose it with you. [Read more…]
During a recent business trip, I had the opportunity to attend a sister plant in another part of the world. I had been told how good the plant was in Planning & Scheduling. When I attended the weekly planning meeting, I was shocked. It was chaos and confusion, with the planner writing notifications to be put on next week’s schedule, which started the next day. They thought this was good practice.
Often, we don’t know, what we don’t know. This leads the belief that an operation is not world class when it is and vice versa. [Read more…]
When equipment breaks unexpectedly it is good practice to investigate why it happened so that the root cause can be rectified and the problem prevented from again happening.
There are no mysterious causes, only poor systems or system failures. It is not often that people intentionally sabotage plant and equipment.
By analyzing why a thing happened the lesson can be absorbed and changes made to business systems to reduce its probability of reoccurrence.
In this article, four equipment failures are reviewed and investigated to determine their cause and the resulting necessary changes.
Keywords: root cause failure analysis, failure mode. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Ed Perkins (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Unsuspecting consumers, thinking they have found a bargain, or that they have joined the latest gadget trend, or both, can be unpleasantly surprised, according to recent revelations on how mobile and IoT (Internet of Things) devices can have built-in security issues. [Read more…]
Mechanical drawings and electrical schematics communicate the design.
They provide information sufficient to create a product or build a system.
They provide the necessary details that allow others to construct something that originally was only imaged.
We no longer rely on a single craftsman to build a chest of drawers from concept to delivery.
Instead, they may be a team scattered across many organizations relying on the drawings.
Included on the drawings and schematics are dimensions along with tolerances. A keypad will be a specific width, plus/minus some amount. A resistor is nominally 100 ohms, yet anything between 90 and 110 ohms is fine.
Tolerances acknowledge the variability between individual components or caused during the construction process.
Tolerances also impact the reliability performance of your products. [Read more…]
Derating is the selection of components and materials according to a set of standardized safety-margin definitions.
It is used by design engineers to ensure the selected elements of the design do not experience performance problems due to overstress conditions.
Derating, like stress-strength analysis, assists the designer when selecting elements for the product or system.
The outcome is a robust design able to withstand the expected, and some of the unexpected, stress applied. [Read more…]
Welcome to my latest 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance. To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles, I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital-intensive industry.
Leadership is all about making change and taking your organization in new directions. Leaders rock the boat, managers keep it stable. In choosing excellence you’ll be choosing a path of constant change and improvement – leadership is essential. Leadership is about strategy, effective execution and your people – without them you accomplish very little. If you want excellence you need leadership. [Read more…]
There are many internal & external pressures on our operations. Many we don’t even think about, or are even aware of. These pressures greatly influence our ability to be profitable, and therefore sustainable. Being aware of these pressures & barriers will allow us to head them off and ensure our profitability.
I remember when I was unexpectedly asked to cut my maintenance staff by 30%. What I wasn’t aware of was one of the largest external pressures, the shareholders. They were not impressed by the returns and demanded immediate action. [Read more…]
The efficient use of men, materials and external resources requires coordination and preparation.
When a job starts everything needed to do the job must be at hand and must be right to use. The maintenance planner does the preparation required prior to the start of a job.
The planner’s focus is to prepare everything needed to execute a job through to its successful completion and have it ready and on-hand before the job starts.
How well the planning job is done directly affects how efficiently the men do the work and how long it takes for it to be done.
Keywords: job scheduling, breakdown work. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Ed Perkins (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
In an earlier post [1] we looked whether ‘plausible deniability’ was now a dead strategy in the face of enterprise risk management (ERM) and the likely impact of the US SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) guidance [2] regarding disclosure obligations relating to operational and cybersecurity risks and cyber incidents. The SEC noted that “a number of disclosure requirements may impose an obligation on registrants to disclose such risks and incidents. [Read more…]
Technical drawings and electrical specifications often include tolerances.
The range of values allowed for a particular aspect of the part.
Reliability engineers do not set the tolerances, yet we should both understand and influence them.
A critical element of design for reliability is the creation of a robust product.
It is not just robust in the end use, your product should also be robust to the variability that will occur during manufacturing and transportation. [Read more…]
If you are like me, then you have at least once found yourself struggling with Reliability & Maintenance(R&M) in a plant. Whether you are trying to implement planning & scheduling, manage spare parts or develop effective PMs, it can be frustrating. Not to mention how difficult it is to tie all of the different pieces together and making it stick.
The intention of this blog and website is to provide information on not only the different parts of a R&M program, but how they all tie together. This is what separates the profitable manufacturers from the ones that close. Preventing these closures is what High Performance Reliability and myself want to do. [Read more…]
Guest Post by John Mason (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
The audit is finished, the exit meeting conducted and the audit report has hit your desk. As discussed, there should be no surprises, there should be correctly categorized findings, and specific examples.
Now you have 3, 6, 9 or 12 months in which to fix them.
If you have findings that have to be addressed within 3 months, then you have got a nonconformity or a major corrective action (of course the names are different for every certification service provider). [Read more…]
