True of False? RCM has serious weaknesses in an industrial environment.
Articles
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Check Valve Failures
Check valves are commonly used in the process industry for preventing back-flow or reverse flow.
Check valves achieve unidirectional flow by means of a mechanical partition – ball, diaphragm, disc.
Defining a Failure? – it is Actually up to You!
The reliability definition in relation to asset failures
Maintenance and Reliability professionals deal with equipment failures all the time. However, the word “failure” could have different definitions or thresholds. In order to take adequate and effective action, it is important to have clear specifications for what a “failure” truly is.
[Read more…]The SR-71 Blackbird RCM Fallacy
Reliability by prevention vs. reliability by failure analysis
Here is a story of multimillion dollar aircraft failures that could have been prevented by spending $25. But no one did the risk analysis right using a financial model of the consequences. It’s also the story of why RCM is a poor maintenance strategy selection methodology. RCM will send you to financial disaster and you won’t even know it. Learn how to decide when doing preventive maintenance is far better for business success than doing the on-condition maintenance recommended by business-destroying RCM analysis.
Solving the Skilled Trades Shortage
Your skilled maintenance trades are a valuable resource that is often squandered by poor management and a lack of proactive approach to the maintenance of industrial assets.
This article by RBC’s Thought Leadership group on Human Capital describes a problem that many of our industrial customers are dealing with.
Criticality Map is Vital to Risk Management
Guest Post by Patrick Ow (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Criticality Map, a strategic top-down analytical tool that I developed and used, is vital for risk management, assurance mapping, and regulatory compliance. It is a great simplified tool for effectively guiding management action and resource allocation and as a sanity check.
The Softer Side of Success: Unlocking the Power of Soft Skills
In the world of reliability and quality engineering, technical expertise and domain knowledge have always been highly valued. Engineers are expected to possess a strong foundation of technical skills to excel in their roles. However, in today’s rapidly evolving workplace, it has become increasingly evident that technical ability alone is not enough to guarantee success. The modern engineering professional must recognize and embrace the importance of soft skills to complement their analytical skills.
In this blog post, we will dive into the significance of soft skills in the workplace and how they can enhance the effectiveness and success of reliability and quality engineering professionals.
[Read more…]With Weibull, What Shape Value Should your Product Have for Better Reliability?
The LinkedIn ASQ RRD group published this question from a reliability manager. Replies included:
- “Beta (shape parameter) should be close to 1 for more useful life. But it should not be less than 1.”
- “For Beta you would like to get as close to one as possible.”
- “A Shape of 1 within warranty is good.”
- “It depends on B2B, yes it should be close to 1 that’s within warranty.
1884 – Depreciation and Maintenance Cannot be Separated
In the 19th century, factories and mills were major concentrations of capital. Manufacturing completed for investment money, and business cases could be as closely examined as any other risky investment. In 1884, Edwin Matheson wrote about how maintenance affected accounting and business prospects in The Depreciation of Factories and their Valuation. Matheson’s book became the basis of modern views of depreciation.
How Conservative and Prudent can a Risk Decision be? – Practical uses of Confidence Boundaries
Introducing confidence boundaries
Confidence boundaries can be confusing to reliability engineering practitioners and their audience. Yet, they can play an important role in the risk-based decision-making process. When building statistical models, there is always uncertainty around the model because it is usually based on a smaller sample of the studied population. The confidence interval is the range of values you expect your model to fall between a certain percentage of the time if you run your experiment again or re-sample the population similarly. For example, using a 90% confidence boundary, one would expect 90% of the records to fall between the upper and lower confidence boundaries. As a rule of thumb, the more data you have, the more precise the model and the narrower the confidence boundaries. In essence, if we have an infinite amount of data, we will end up with a perfect model. However, this is never the case. Confidence boundaries help establish the accuracy of the model and also provide some information on the validity of the data.
[Read more…]Airline Security And Lithium Battery Fires
According to the FAA, there have been 113 battery fire incidents on passenger and cargo planes between 1991-2010. There is a battery fire incident every two months in the airline industry.
An Excel – VBA Driven Weibull Calculator
Every Reliability Engineer will be familiar with the Weibull Analysis. Most of us even have an Excel template laying around that we refer to!
The problem is, that when we have to handle Suspended data (e.g. components that haven’t failed yet at time of observation), the Excel sheet must use VBA in the background if the user wants a “single-button” tool.
[Read more…]The 10 Habits of Highly Effective Reliability-AM Professionals
Over thirty years ago, Steven R. Covey, renowned author and business management guru, introduced to us The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which presented an approach to being effective in attaining personal or business goals by aligning to what he called “True North” principles based on character ethics. This book has become a best seller, a must-read, and has sold 40 million copies worldwide.
Find Me the Statistics that I Like to Believe the Most …
It looks like 2023 will be the hottest year on record. Along with all the cyclones, hurricanes, floods and bushfires we have already had. Those who study and take climate change seriously unanimously agree that man-made changes to the environment are causing the climate to change so fast that mother nature will struggle to keep up.
And for the minority (yes, it is a minority as has been confirmed by many surveys and studies across the world), their arguments against climate change go something like this …
It might not be because of us …
… so it’s definitely not because of us.
Is your Data Good Enough for Machine Learning-Based Predictive Maintenance (PdM)?
One of the common questions teams have when they first explore using Predictive Maintenance is “Is the data good enough to perform the analysis?” Answer to that question is nuanced with the reliability objective and the quality of the data available.
[Read more…]