Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Recently heard from a reader of NoMTBF. She wondered about a supplier’s argument that they meet the reliability or MTBF requirements. She was right to wonder.
Estimating reliability performance a new design is difficult.
There are good and better practice to justify claims about future reliability performance. Likewise, there are just plain poor approaches, too. Plus there are approaches that should never be used.
With the 1980 X-Car series, General Motors introduced a new generation of front-wheel drive, fuel-efficient compact passenger cars. The letter X designated a generic chassis type that was manufactured into a particular model through styling and features. All X-Cars were tested and met all Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, but during the development of the vehicles it was found that certain manual transmission X-Cars required more aggressive rear brake shoes to meet parking brake standards.
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VITAL PLANT AND EQUIPMENT RELIABILITY TIPS FOR WORLD CLASS PRODUCTION RESULTS WITH A PWW EAM SYSTEM-OF-RELIABILITY
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With Plant Wellness Way EAM you will change to engineering, operating, and maintenance methods that guarantee world class reliability practices are done throughout your company and its operations
Imagine your business without breakdowns, fewer spare parts in a smaller parts Store and lower operating costs everyday. All the while you enjoy world class reliability success that delivers outstanding plant availability in all of your operating plants. To get to this world you will need to Change the Game to one where you guarantee fantastic reliability success! [Read more…]
I’ve been asked this many times, along with, “when will it be available in “my language?”
Here’s the answer… My book Uptime – Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management is now in its 3rd edition, and it includes a chapter on Evidence-Based Asset Management. That approach—using data plus expert knowledge—was groundbreaking back in 2015. Since then, AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics have changed the game. The science behind Uptime is still valid, but the methods need updating.
So, people ask me all the time: “Is there a 4th edition coming?” My answer: “Yes… but not in the way you might expect.”
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The NASCAR pit stop – it’s exciting, intense, and can mean the difference between winning and losing a race. Accomplishing the three simultaneous necessities of moving quickly, completing each job with perfection, and having a flawlessly coordinated team seem impossible, yet it happens right in front of your eyes. The feedback is immediate: either the car gets off in less than ten seconds, and the driver can compete for a spot on the podium, or it doesn’t, and your race is over.
Outside of the racetrack, could the NASCAR pit stop be the answer to exciting young people about manufacturing? Could you use lessons from NASCAR to improve your company’s teamwork?
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Can Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) reduce proactive maintenance? The answer is: It depends.
In this video, I share real-world examples of organizations that reduced proactive maintenance by over 50% after implementing RCM. But there’s more to the story—what if your organization is reactive and struggling with downtime? In that case, RCM might actually increase proactive maintenance to improve reliability and reduce chronic issues.
The key is to focus on identifying proactive maintenance tasks that are technically appropriate and worth doing. RCM helps ensure your equipment serves you reliably, whether that means reducing or increasing proactive maintenance.
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Asset management is a critical function in any organization that relies on physical assets to deliver products or services. Whether in manufacturing, utilities, transportation, or facilities management, the ability to maximize asset performance while minimizing costs and risks is key to long-term success. However, effective asset management doesn’t happen by chance—it requires a structured approach. This is where an Asset Management Policy becomes essential.
An Asset Management Policy serves as the foundation for an organization’s asset management strategy. It defines the principles, objectives, and guidelines that govern how assets are acquired, maintained, and retired. Without a clear policy, asset management can become inconsistent, reactive, and inefficient.
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Reliability, Availability and Maintainability are often discussed together. While closely related in practice, they are not the same thing and the distinctions are not always well understood.
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Understanding how long an asset will remain useful is one of the most fundamental questions in facility, infrastructure, and asset management. Yet it’s also one of the most misunderstood because different disciplines approach the concept from different angles. “Useful life” is a collection of perspectives shaped by engineering, finance, and operations. Getting clear on those perspectives is the first step toward systems thinking and making better decisions.
Before we discuss the twelve ways to express asset life, let’s define the three foundational concepts that underpin many of those terms. [Read more…]
This article is adapted from Chapter 4 of my book, Measuring Manufacturing Effectiveness.
The book is organized as a structured, multi-chapter examination of how manufacturing organizations define, measure, and interpret “effectiveness.” Rather than focusing on isolated metrics or individual tools, it treats measurement as a system, one that directly influences operational decisions, improvement priorities, and management behavior across manufacturing organizations.
Each chapter is written to stand on its own, while also contributing to a larger, integrated framework for understanding manufacturing performance.
Chapter 4 introduces the core components that make up Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). While OEE is often presented as a single number, it is actually the product of three distinct elements, each representing a different category of loss and a different dimension of system performance.
This chapter provides an orientation to those components, explains what each is intended to capture, and establishes the conceptual foundation needed before OEE can be used meaningfully as a measurement or improvement tool.
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Reliability testing is expensive. The results are often not conclusive.
Yet we spend billions on environmental, accelerated, growth, step stress and other types of reliability tests. We bake, shake, rattle and roll prototypes and production units alike. We examine the collected data in hopes of glimpsing the future. [Read more…]
The Hindenburg disaster, which occurred on May 6, 1937, at Naval Air Station Lakehurst in New Jersey, marked the end of the golden age of airship travel. This catastrophic event not only claimed 36 lives but also exposed significant design flaws and reliability issues in what was once considered a marvel of engineering.
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As The Saying Goes, “How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything.”
Your work quality should bring you great joy every time you do your job. There’s a little secret that will let you love work and draw happiness from every task you do.
Competition against others only gives you satisfaction when they lose, and you beat them. It’s such a sad, poor way to live life. Yet competition against yourself brings you joy every time you use it.
I love making my bed to world-class work quality in the morning. It makes me happy. That’s because the job satisfaction is entirely in my control. Whether you leave your bed looking like a tornado hit it, or you leave it like a 5-star showroom display, is completely up to you and you alone. I leave my bed made up to 5-star world-class work quality every day because it makes me proud. And being proud of my work brings me satisfaction and happiness.
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True risks are often different than perceived risks. Due to human curiosity, the desire to sell news, 24-hour-a-day news blitz, and current trends, some folks have a distorted sense of risks. Most often, people fear the lesser or trivial risks and fail to respect the significant dangers faced every day.
We live in a dangerous world. Yet it is also a world safer in many ways than it has ever been. Life expectancy is up. Infant mortality is down. Diseases that only recently were mass killers have been all but eradicated. Advances in public health, medicine, environmental regulation, food safety, and worker protection have dramatically reduced many of the major risks we faced just a few decades ago.
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Should you use Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Failure Modes Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA), or Condition Based Maintenance (CBM)?
In this video, I explain how RCM incorporates all of these processes into one comprehensive approach. By following the RCM process — steps like identifying Functions, Failure Modes, Failure Effects, and assessing Consequences — you naturally create an FMEA, a FMECA, and consider CBM as a potential failure management strategy.
With RCM, you don’t have to choose — you do it all! Watch to learn how this powerful methodology ensures you get exactly what you need from your equipment.
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