Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Methane being extremely flammable, the fire and gas detection (FGD) system in LNG facilities should be capable of early detection of flammable gas leading to shutdown/isolation and depressurization.
[Read more…]Leading is about learning to be a facilitator – Ashif Shaikh
Ask yourself, when teams work very well together, what are the positive characteristics of the team leader? When teams are dysfunctional, and have poor outcomes, what skills of the leader need to be improved?
Giving proper feedback is a great way to help a colleague improve FMEA facilitation skills. Carefully listening to feedback from a colleague is an important way to improve one’s own FMEA facilitation skills. Both are aided by understanding and using facilitation quality objectives. [Read more…]
In February 2021, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published an Enterprise Risk Management Maturity Model. This model is designed for Tax Administration Agencies. It is the culmination of work that began in 2018. This work was designed to develop stand-alone maturity models for a broad range of organizational activities. One of which was Enterprise Risk Management. This piece examines this model and discusses how such models are being used by government elsewhere.
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This simple example explains how to calculate the failure rate of parts, known as the Hazard Rate, using a drinking glass. Historic records, like maintenance, operating, supply chain, and financial information, are accessed to understand the situation being analyzed and gather modelling data. Once all necessary information is collected and the situation is investigated, then proposals to address and solve the problems causing and permitting the failure to happen are selected and a business case is developed.
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“Aircraft LRUs test NFF (No-Failure-Found) approximately 50% of the time” {Anderson] Wabash Magnetics claimed returned crankshaft position sensors had 89-90% NTF (No-Trouble-Found), Uniphase had 20%, Apple computer had 50% [George].
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In this episode, we answer two questions: 1) What is Reliability? 2) How do we get the Reliability we need from our machines? Nancy also discusses how we design our Reliability both literally and figuratively. The quality of our proactive maintenance and Default Strategies largely determines the Reliability we get from our equipment. Inherent Reliability is explained.
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Lithium batteries catch fire if the anode and cathode materials contact each other. What causes short-circuit leading to anode-cathode contact?
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About 13 years ago, I began a reliability journey at a large paper mill. At that time, the mill was pretty reactive and I was naïve enough to think I was going to single handedly turn it around. While I thought I had all the answers and was going to teach the mill a thing or two about reliability, it ended up teaching me a hell of a lot more.
[Read more…]Value Stream Mapping is a business process improvement tool. It derives from the Toyota Production System where it was used to identify the seven wastes in a production process. It is now used across all business processes because the principle of finding and removing waste applies throughout every business.
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The Pareto Principle, or more commonly the “80/20 rule”, is based upon the observation that 80% of the consequences of something are attributable to 20% of the causes. The quality guru Joseph Moses Juran named the Principle in 1941 after the Italian economist who, in 1896, observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. The centenarian also similarly observed that 80% of quality problems result from 20% of the causes. In the business world we also see that 80% of a company’s revenue is generated by only 20% of its customers. As with life, things are not distributed either evenly or even fairly.
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As the quality manger for a tier two automotive supplier, I recently had the opportunity to hire a quality supervisor following the retirement of a long-time member of our team. Our company’s human resource manager and I worked together through the entire selection process. Given the status of our region’s economy and the recent closure of several large factories, I wasn’t surprised when our mailbox started filling up with resumes in response to ads on the popular Internet job sites. The typical respondent was a mid-career professional with over 15 years of experience in manufacturing that had either been recently laid-off due or who wanted to move up in their career.
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Last year, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) is not meeting its statutory mandate by investigating major chemical accidents.
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Technological inheritance, defect inheritance, and quality inheritance transfer to the future. To create a better future for your organization you first must create a better past so it can later inherit the preordained successes you designed and imbedded into your company.
[Read more…]“That’s a Red Flag!” goes the cry from some when something amiss is recognised. However, many project participants don’t realise that their Project sails through a sea of flags and that, on some occasion, the flags can be read as red by somebody at some time.
In a similar nautical vein the Roman writer Ovid once poetized “The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders even at a calm sea“. While written some 2,000 years ago it is as true today as it ever was and a reminder to us all that risks lurk everywhere. Some risks may not be identified, let alone assessed and may go unnoticed until they strike. We need to be aware and vigilant and avoid a complacent belief that a risk register is the be all and end all.
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How is failure testing done on the Space Station? Could FTA (Fault Tree Analysis) be used in reverse to detect multiple failures given symptoms? That’s what NASA was programming in the 1990s. I proposed that the ratios P[part failure]/(part test time) be used to optimally sequence tests. Those ratios work if there are multiple failures, as long as failure rates are constant and failure times are statistically independent.
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