Articles

Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.

Your Best Enterprise Asset Management Strategy is to Walk an Hour Every Day

How You Look After Your Body Is A Tell-Tale Of How You Look After Every Other Physical Asset

The Care and Conditions You Give to Your Body Show the Values and Principles You’ll Use On Your Organization’s Physical Assets

The ancient Egyptian saying, “As above, so below. As within, so without” contains much truth. What you create outside of you comes from inside of you. Which implies if you want to have a particular thing it’s necessary to first create the capability inside of you. To achieve your goal by any other way is due to random luck.

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by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

Revealed! The Overlooked Power of Failure Effects in RCM

What makes Failure Effects so powerful in Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)?

In this video, I dive into step four of the RCM process: writing Failure Effects. I explain how these “little stories” of what happens if we do nothing to predict or prevent a failure mode are essential for assessing consequences—whether they impact safety, the environment, operations, or have non-operational consequences.

I also share a real-world example from the nuclear industry, where identifying specific operating restrictions in a failure effect uncovered an opportunity to improve reliability by rethinking how procedures impact operations.

Writing failure effects isn’t just about documenting failure—it’s about uncovering opportunities to improve your reliability.

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by Chris Weir Leave a Comment

Reliability, Safety and Quality – Understanding the Interrelationships

Reliability, safety, and quality are commonly considered separate disciplines, each with their own people, processes and tools. In practice, they are deeply interconnected and decisions made in one area almost always influence the others, particularly once systems are in service.

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by JD Solomon Leave a Comment

How Reliability Engineers Can Effectively Communicate Asset Life

Communicating “asset life” is far harder than it looks. The term sounds universal, yet accountants, engineers, and operations leaders often mean entirely different things when they use it. When organizations fail to reconcile them, capital plans become unrealistic, maintenance strategies drift, and leadership loses confidence in the numbers. When we communicate asset life clearly and contextually correctly, we create shared understanding and decisions that hold up in the real world.

Summary of Asset Life in Plain Terms

The goal is to see why each life exists and integrate them into decisions.

Mean life is statistical and shows inherent reliability.
Useful life is accounting-related and guides financial recovery.
Service life reflects operational reality.

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by nomtbf Leave a Comment

The Magic Math of Meeting MTBF Requirements

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.

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by Semion Gengrinovich Leave a Comment

The GM X-Car Safety

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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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

5 Fantastic Plant And Equipment Reliability Tips

From Plant Wellness Way Eam System-Of-Reliability

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…]

by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Is there going to be a 4th edition of “Uptime”?

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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by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Three Lessons Manufacturers Can Learn From NASCAR Racing

Guest Post by Matt Fieldman (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

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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by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

Is RCM the Secret to Reducing Maintenance?

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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by Joe Anderson Leave a Comment

The Importance of an Asset Management Policy in Overall Asset Management

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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by Chris Weir 2 Comments

Reliability, Availability and Maintainability – how they fit together.

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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by JD Solomon Leave a Comment

Systems Thinking and Twelve Ways to Express Asset Life

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.

The Big Three

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…]

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

Orientation to the OEE Components

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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by nomtbf Leave a Comment

Is Your Reliability Testing Adding Value?

Why Do Reliability Testing

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…]