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

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Total Cost of Downtime

Total Cost of Downtime

The total cost of downtime extends across the business. In the worst cases, it impacts the entire organisation and customers.

From the moment of failure to the restart of production, no saleable product is made. Instead, money is spent on repairs, with continued fixed costs, and any potential profits that could have been made from saleable products is lost. The graph below illustrates what happens to production time and costs when operations stop due to equipment breakdown (t1). The time and costs required to repair the equipment to operational levels (t2) is unknown at the start of the breakdown.

During this time (t1 to t2) resources and money are needed to return the equipment to operation. Additional costs due to loss of production and therefore potential profit losses are also incurred in this time.

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Failure Effects in RCM: Why They Matter and How to Write Them

Failure Effects in RCM: Why They Matter and How to Write Them

In this video, filmed at the historic La Popa Monastery in Cartagena, Colombia, I dive into the importance of Failure Effects in the Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) process. Failure Effects might seem like just one step in the RCM journey, but they’re essential for understanding the impact of Failure Modes — and that’s what makes them so special.

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CMMS in Maintenance

CMMS in Maintenance

The Importance of CMMS in Maintenance: A Game Changer for Reliability and Efficiency 

In today’s fast-paced industrial and manufacturing environments, maintenance teams are under constant pressure to keep assets running efficiently while minimizing downtime and controlling costs. A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) has become an essential tool for achieving these goals. More than just a digital record-keeping system, a CMMS provides a structured and data-driven approach to asset management, work order tracking, preventive maintenance scheduling, and overall maintenance optimization. 

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What do we Really Mean by “Reliability”?

What do we Really Mean by “Reliability”?

When people hear the word reliability, it’s often interpreted as meaning “zero failures”. While that’s understandable, it’s not what reliability engineering is really about.

The Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE) Body of Knowledge, produced by the American Society for Quality, defines reliability as:

“The probability that an item will perform a required function without failure under stated conditions for a specified period of time”

Crucially, each part of this definition needs to be clearly understood and agreed from the outset, particularly between customers and suppliers. Many reliability problems arise not because the definition itself is wrong, but because these elements are interpreted differently.

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FMEA Quality Objective 13: LINKAGE

None of us is a smart as all of us. – Ken Blanchard

FMEAs have great potential value to improve product designs and manufacturing processes. That value increases significantly when FMEA is properly linked and connected to other analyses.

How can FMEA be linked to other analyses to increase value?

1. Design FMEA can be linked to Process FMEA.

  • Causes in the DFMEA become inputs to identification of failure modes in the PFMEA.
  • Effects in the DFMEA become inputs to identification of product-related effects in the PFMEA.
  • DFMEA can recommend Special Product Characteristics that are input to PFMEA.
  • Product designs must be able to be manufactured and assembled, and this can be supported by the DFMEA team considering design improvements that help ensure the design can easily be manufactured without failures.

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Three Primary Ways Reliability Engineers Can Look at Asset Life

Three Primary Ways Reliability Engineers Can Look at Asset Life

How long will an asset last? It sounds straightforward, but anyone who has spent time in infrastructure planning knows it’s one of the most deceptively complex questions we face. Reliability engineers, accountants, and operations leaders may use the same terms for asset life, yet they’re often talking about entirely different things—different assumptions, different incentives, different definitions of “truth.”

When those perspectives stay siloed, organizations make decisions that look defensible on paper but fall apart in practice. When we reconcile them, we create clarity, strengthen our systems, and make investment choices that actually hold up in the real world.  Understanding asset life is truly about complexity and systems thinking.

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Boeing 737 MAX: A Reliability Perspective

Boeing 737 MAX: A Reliability Perspective

The tragic crashes of the Boeing 737 Max serve as a stark reminder of the critical role reliability plays in engineering design and practice. These incidents, which occurred in October 2018 and March 2019, resulted in the loss of 346 lives and sent shockwaves through the aviation industry. The crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were not mere accidents but the culmination of a series of engineering oversights, management decisions, and regulatory failures.

At the heart of these tragedies was a complex interplay of advanced technology and human factors. The Boeing 737 Max, designed to be more fuel-efficient than its predecessors, incorporated a new flight control system that would ultimately prove to be its Achilles’ heel. This system, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), was intended to compensate for the aerodynamic changes resulting from the aircraft’s larger, more fuel-efficient engines. However, the MCAS relied heavily on data from a single sensor, creating a single point of failure that would have catastrophic consequences.

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Defining TEEP, OOE, and OEE

Defining TEEP, OOE, and OEE

This article is adapted from Chapter 3 of my book titled Measuring Manufacturing Effectiveness.

The book is organized as a structured, multi-chapter exploration of how manufacturing organizations define, measure, and interpret “effectiveness.” Rather than focusing on isolated metrics or tools, it examines measurement as a system; one that shapes decisions, priorities, and behavior across operations, quality, reliability, and management.

Each chapter is written to stand on its own, while also contributing to a larger, integrated framework for understanding manufacturing performance.

Chapter 3 focuses on three of the most commonly used, and most frequently misunderstood, manufacturing effectiveness metrics:

  • Total Effective Equipment Performance (TEEP)
  • Overall Operations Effectiveness (OOE)
  • Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)

Although these measures are often treated as variations of the same idea, they differ in important and meaningful ways. This chapter clarifies what each metric is designed to measure, the assumptions embedded in each definition, and the types of questions each metric is and is not capable of answering.

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An Accuracy Controlled SOP Protects Against Human Error

An Accuracy Controlled SOP Protects Against Human Error

An Accuracy Controlled Enterprise Ace 3T Standard Operating Procedure Protects Against Human Error and Mistakes

With thousands of opportunities to make human errors and mistakes in a job an ACE 3T standard operating procedure is a powerful way to get work done right-first-time. When the situational risk from errors is too high a Plant Wellness Way EAM System-of-Reliability uses ACE 3T SOPs to ensure work tasks and activities are correct and error-free.

We’re all human, and humans make mistakes—lots of them every day. The image below warns that 10 to 30 errors per 100 opportunities is typical for trained people not using a standard operating procedure. Mistakes happen to all of us. The more complicated the job and the more stressful the situation the higher is the human error rate. A PWW EAM System-of-Reliability protects against human error by giving people an ACE 3T standard operating procedure to follow and be 100% successful.

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Agile 2 and Agility (Part 1)

Agile 2 and Agility (Part 1)

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

If you are running a business today, you probably incorporate digital elements in your products and services.  At the very least, you employ digital technology in the operation of your business.  It’s likely that you have adopted an Agile framework and possibly even DevOps processes.  It’s also likely that you are not getting the productivity boost from it that you should.

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Hardware Product Realization in the Age of AI

Hardware Product Realization in the Age of AI

Chapter 7: Preparing for Agile Hardware Implementation Part 1, Ten things to look out for.

In the previous chapter, we discussed how to prepare your organization to have the strong foundational principles needed to fully utilize agile hardware product development.

This chapter sets you on the path towards being ready for agile hardware product development.

As we mentioned in the previous two episodes, hardware companies need to establish strong foundational principles before applying the best practices of agile hardware product realization. These best practices will be covered in a later episode, but before getting to them, it is worth considering the following set of warning signs to look out for in your current processes and methodologies. Comprehending these as they relate to your current working practices will help you to focus on those elements which can negatively impact your hardware developments.

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What is the REAL reason we do Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)?

What is the REAL reason we do Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)?

Why do we practice Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)? In this video, I share a real-life example from a recent trip that perfectly illustrates RCM’s purpose: managing the consequences of failure.

When my flight faced an issue with its auxiliary power unit (APU), the pilot used alternative methods to keep us moving safely. This experience highlights how RCM principles guide us in deciding which failures need proactive maintenance and which can be managed with other strategies. Join me, Nancy Regan, as I walk through the essence of RCM and how it helps us focus on what truly matters.

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Evaluating Risk: When to Apply a Risk Matrix or Monte Carlo Analysis

Evaluating Risk: When to Apply a Risk Matrix or Monte Carlo Analysis

I seldom hear anyone criticize the risk matrix in asset management. Such criticism is usually reserved for the risk management community, where the risk matrix remains the favorite punching bag. On the other extreme of analytics, Monte Carlo analysis is seen as the quiet, poorly understood savior of all. As with most things, the truth is somewhere in between. This article briefly describes when to apply a risk matrix and when to opt for Monte Carlo analysis.

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