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Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
How can we tell whether an iron is hot enough? The answer is obvious: We can measure temperature by using a thermocouple and a meter. But, in practice, we lick our finger and touch the iron. Sizzle…. Yes, it’s hot!
We know a priori the boiling temperature of water and we can evaluate the temperature of the iron. This method has a lower cost. [Read more…]
Discover 15 ways to operate so there is less maintenance, fewer maintenance people, lower maintenance costs and (because there is less maintenance) your plant runs reliably for longer! Most of the 15 topics covered are new to operations and maintenance. Each one reduces downtime, save money and improves operating uptime and performance.
We have many kinds of assurance in the project management world. These, generically include business assurance to track the economic viability of a project, technical assurance for the technical integrity of a product, process or system, and user assurance to check that specified requirements have been met. Assurance demonstrates compliance to a project’s business case, meeting end user’s operational requirements, and that there is technical compliance against codes, standards or specifications.
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George Williams, Founder and CEO of ReliabilityX, discusses how Weekly Scheduling helps drive improvement in the efficiency of the maintenance organization! Have any questions? Drop a comment below!
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Great facilitators anticipate trouble when guiding groups. We normally consider conflict between the participants as the most likely disruptor. However, facilitators should be prepared to overcome a handful of disruptor types in collaborative sessions. This article discusses technology misfires and provides three case examples with solutions.
We’ve been having monthly Pee Dee River Basin Council meetings for nearly two years. I serve as the facilitator of the 25-person group and Clemson’s University’s Tom Walker is the logistics coordinator. The meetings are in a hybrid format that allows the public and stakeholders to view the meetings virtually. The meeting was Zoom-bombed mid-way through the January 2024 meeting.
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Let’s say we want to characterize the reliability performance of a vendor’s device. We’re considering including the device within our system, if and only if, it will survive 5 years reasonably well.
The vendor’s data sheet lists an MTBF value of 200,000 hours. A call to the vendor and search of their site doesn’t reveal any additional reliability information. MTBF is all we have.
We don’t trust it. Which is wise.
Now we want to run an ALT to estimate a time to failure distribution for the device. The intent is to use an acceleration model to accelerate the testing and a time to failure model to adjust to our various expected use conditions.
Given the device, a small interface module with a few buttons, electronics, a display and enclosure, and the data sheet with MTBF, how can we design a meaningful ALT? [Read more…]
Risk is a function of how poorly a strategy will perform if the “wrong” scenario occurs. Michael Porter
The use of Compensating Provisions in FMEA is a key part of many FMEA standards. Regardless of what FMEA standard you are using, everyone who aspires to doing FMEAs properly should understand the role of mitigating the risk of very high severity.
Recently, I was talking to the Managing Director of a large recruiting firm for safety professionals in Toronto about the importance of communication skills.
It was very clear that safety leaders are just expected to be experts in the technical aspects of safety, but it’s the ability to communicate about safety that sets apart the great safety leaders from the mediocre.
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An endless Dilemma confronts every business. It is how to ensure that the activities we undertake will always produce the intended results.
Explosions, workplace deaths, harmful accidents, physical injuries, damaged goods, scrapped jobs, repeat work, manufacturing errors, operating mistakes, bad repairs, misunderstanding, wrong decisions, supplier miscommunication and poor delivery performance are all examples of the many unwanted troubles and problems caused by the Dilemma. Its impacts and effects have been written about for more than 6,000 years of recorded human history.
The Dilemma’s prevalence throughout the world indicates that human beings are a major contributor. A second major factor is business design: how your processes are configured and operate determines your degree of success in addressing the Dilemma. A third big cause is our training and education processes which have transferred the Dilemma all through businesses and across cultures for over 60 centuries. To stop the Dilemma affecting your company you can use what we have learnt about the universe, people and business processes during the last 100 years.
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Dear friends, Institute of Quality and Reliability is happy to release this video on Reliability Testing Sampling Plans. In this is Part-2 of the video, Hemant Urdhwareshe has explained the Probability Ratio Sequential Test (PRST) and Fixed Length plans from MIL-Handbook-781. These include illustrated explanation of the plans and applicability.
We are sure, viewers will find this video useful!
Earlier, we released part 1 of the video, in which Hemant explained the concepts of sampling risks and operating characteristics (OC) curves.
We also suggest viewers to see our related videos on Hazard Rate and related concepts for better understanding of this video.
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In this video we touch on all 7 steps of the RCM process as we introduce one of the most important aspects of the application of RCM…asking the people who really know!
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I have often heard employees complain they have no data to initiate a proper Reliability Improvement Program. This is not always true. And to no fault of theirs. They just don’t know how to use what they already have in terms of records. If you are running an operation, you should at least have production records – i.e. how much you are producing on a daily basis. If you don’t have this, then maybe you should not be in business at all. This article looks at ways to initiate a Reliability Program using the Barringer Process Reliability (BPR) methodology. The greatest advantage of this methodology is that it only requires productions records as an input. That is how many units of production the plant produces on a daily basis. For example, the barrels of crude oil processed per day in a refinery. Or the hectoliters of beer brewed in a brewery daily.
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Background:
A histogram – is an approximate representation of the distribution of numerical data. The term was first introduced by Karl Pearson:
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