Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
In line with the RAM acronym sequence, we often start and go no further than the “R” in Reliability. In doing so, we forget about the “M”. The question often asked is: “what is the reliability of the system?” But rarely asked is: “what is the maintainability of the same system?” Myself, am guilty of this omission. Hence this article to remind myself and you the reader, of the importance of Maintainability in industry.
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Apple recently did something that it isn’t in the habit of doing. And that is – admitting failure. After spending $ 10 billion on ‘Project Titan’ whose aim was to produce a ‘really cool car,’ Apple decided to pull the pin and cancel it.
Simplifying Apple’s Project Titan ambitions to something as pithy as creating a ‘really cool car’ might seem a little condescending. The problem for Apple was that unfortunately, this was the practical truth. And that is why it failed.
If I must date myself, I cut my teeth as a product development engineer in the automotive industry in the bad old days when warranty terms were shockingly poor. Let’s examine this through the lens of my first new car which I purchased in 1984. Why was my warranty coverage so bad, what drove the significant improvements seen in the industry since that time, and how do we now validate our products to keep it that way?
When facing yet another field issue with a high price tag, my Chief Technical Officer asked me, “How do we get more predictive so we can identify and prevent these failures from occurring in the future?” Similarly, I had a friend who was trying to optimize a key customer feature of a future product. He ran robustness experimentation considering over 40 noise and control factors that the team had brainstormed. And yet, when field trials started, the device had several failures of unknown cause. Of the more than 40 factors that they had considered during brainstorming, they missed the noise factor that was triggering these failures. I’ll turn to you and ask the same question: How do we get better at predicting future failures and preventing them from occurring? If we had infinite knowledge, we could see these failures before they occurred.
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I am a rock climber. Climbing relies on skill, strength, knowledge, luck, and sound gear. Falling is a part of the sport, and with the right gear, the sport is safe. So far, I’ve enjoy no equipment failures.
I do not know, nor want to know, the MTBF (or MTTF) of any of my climbing gear. I’m not even sure this information would be available. And, all the gear I use has a finite chance of failing every time the equipment is in use. Part of my confidence is that the probability of failure is really low.
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Human error causes 80% of plant and equipment failures. It is the single factor, which if controlled, makes the most difference to achieving world class equipment reliability and operational success. With the introduction of low cost communication and visual devices it is now possible to assist maintenance workers proactively prevent human error. By using interactive audio-visual devices workers can be coached through a job error-free to get right-first-time quality every time.
Ethics is about making choices that may not always feel good or seem like they benefit you but are the right choices to make. They are the choices that are examples of model citizens and examples of the golden rules. We’ve all heard the golden rules: Don’t hurt, don’t steal, don’t lie, or one of the most famous: Do unto others as you would have done to you. These are not just catchy phrases; these are words of wisdom that any productive member of society should strive to live by.
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In the last video on stress-strength interference, we have seen the analytical method. This has limitations and often cannot be used in real life problems in reliability prediction. For example, velocity of windmill may have Weibull or lognormal distribution, elevators may have particular application load cycles which can only be modelled using empirical distributions. In such situations, we need to use Monte Carlo Simulation using various other distributions. I will discuss and explain this technique in this video.
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No way. It helps if you have a love – or even a fondness – for equipment maintenance and reliability. But other than that, just put your thinking cap on and you’re good-to-go!
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In 1861, Royal Navy regulations updated the Captain’s responsibilities. Centralized management control of the technical system continued to grow. Regulations now prevented Captains from modifying the ship. Many new standard report forms were required to be routed to superior offices in the bureaucracy.
Many rules from the 1717 and 1731 regulations were kept, for example: managing ship surveys, tracking repair costs, written communications with the dockyard about defects and their status, and periodic caulking.
[Read more…]“Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” William James
Whether you are conveying knowledge to one person or teaching a class, there is no more important factor than getting and maintaining the attention of the other person. Managing attention is a skill that can be learned.
Communicating with FINESSE and JD Solomon Inc. are jointly focusing on asset management in early 2024. The articles include how to facilitate asset management plans, ways that asset management plans fail, how organizational context impacts implementation, and how to communicate asset management to senior management. These powerful articles will improve your asset management success!
Facilitation is a structured session(s) in which the meeting leader (the facilitator) guides the participants through a series of predefined steps to arrive at a result that is created, understood, and accepted by all participants. Not all asset managers are great facilitators.
These are my Top 5 tips for facilitating asset management plans:
5. Get the Right People Involved
4. Don’t Overthink the Gap Analysis Tool
3. Create a Charter
2. Establish Organizational Context
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This episode speaks to the need to engage our field people to drive defect elimination at your site.
The classic formula for availability is MTBF divided by MTBF plus MTTF. Standard. And pretty much wrong most of the time.
Recently, working for a bottling plant design team, we pursued design options to improve the availability and throughput of the new line. The equipment would remain the same: filler, capper, labeler, etc. So we decided to gather the last six months or so of operating data, which included up and down time. Furthermore, the data included time to failure and time to repair information.
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We can learn more from our failures than we can from our successes. This isn’t just a good rule for us to live by personally but is applicable to the products that we design and manufacture. In my experience, the all-important step that is short-changed in “learning from our failures” is “learning”—not just getting to the root cause in order to solve the problem but to understanding the gaps that exist in our current design and manufacturing requirements and practices that allowed the failure to spill into the field. Identifying these gaps is the key to future failure prevention. In this installment, I’m going to highlight how Weibull Analysis (a reliability tool when used in the time domain) of module field failures can be used to identify the holes in our design or manufacturing requirements or processes.
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