Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Chris and Fred discussing the 3 perspectives of Fault Tree Analysis or FTA. What … there are 3 perspectives? … what are perspectives when it comes to FTA?
ᐅ Play Episode
We often get sucked into drawn-out conversations (or heated debates) about the ‘true’ meaning of words. Especially when it comes to sports. Was James Harden (a basketball player) in the ‘act of shooting’ when he was fouled? It matters – because if the answer is ‘yes’ he gets up to three free throws. So what does the ‘act of shooting’ mean and who decides it? There will be endless debate over beers about what this means. Perhaps largely dependent on which team you support.
At the end of the day, it usually doesn’t matter. You can debate it as much as you want, but the referees have already decided what happened on the court. It is done. It is over. You can disagree with them. But nothing changes the score. [Read more…]
If nothing changes, then nothing changes. Change happens when we decide to do something. The status quo remains if we decide to do nothing. We make decisions every day. We do it so often that it might seem like a trivial thing to do. But we so often get it wrong. We might be influenced by emotion, prejudice, time pressure, budgetary stress, or ‘mental comfort.’ [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss ‘proactive’ reliability engineering … and trying to get out of being ‘reactive.’ Some entire organizations are structure around waiting for the catastrophe to happen before we fix it. So changing perspectives can be challenging.
ᐅ Play Episode
Chris and Fred discuss how reliability starts at the top of every organization. And by that, we mean … leadership. What does that mean? How can the CEO be more important for reliability performance than the reliability engineer with decades of experience and post-graduate qualifications?
ᐅ Play Episode
When I was working at a university, I was involved in a conversation with a representative of an energy company. He was having all manners of problems with a valve. It was failing too often. He wanted us to look at what we could do in terms of optimizing the preventive maintenance (PM) or servicing regime to hopefully fix these problems. But … there was a catch.
He had heard about ‘deep learning’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ from another university. And he wanted some of it. [Read more…]
If you have ever been involved in manufacturing or quality-related conversations, you may have heard of ‘Statistical Process Control’ or SPC. And if you Google SPC you will find a bunch of ‘textbooky’ definitions which are likely going to make you run away and never think of it again.
But you shouldn’t. [Read more…]
(Association) football (or ‘soccer’ in some countries) is the world’s most popular sport. Most professional leagues (especially in Europe) have different tiers of competition where the bottom performers of one tier are ‘relegated’ to the next tier down at the end of each season, while the top performers of each tier are ‘promoted’ to the next tier up. This means that any club could feasibly work its way to the top tier of every league. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss (essentially) how many ‘things’ you need to see to know enough about those ‘things.’ We see this conundrum across all sorts of fields of study. How many kangaroos do I need to capture and weigh to get a good understanding of the entire population’s typical weight? Delete kangaroo and insert whatever thing matters to you.
ᐅ Play Episode
Chris and Fred discuss accelerated testing. Accelerated testing is great for getting lots of information in a short period of time. You can compress a lot of ‘real-time’ life into a really small amount of testing. But how do you do it right? You need to understand the underlying physics of failure to work out how the compression of time works.
ᐅ Play Episode
Let’s just say you owned a house with a garden so big that you need someone to look after it for you. So, you find a professional gardener. And (because you have just graduated from a contract management course), you ask your gardener to sign a ‘traditional contract.’
A ‘traditional contract’ means (at least in this post) a contract with hundreds of clauses supposed to cover every possible future scenario. Do you host garden parties and want your gardener to spend 8 hours on your garden in the preceding week? There needs to be a clause for that. What happens if the gardener is sick? What happens if you don’t want the gardener in your garden between 2pm and 4 pm on Tuesdays because you have clarinet practice? What happens if your clarinet practice changes? What if you have 3 feet of snow? What flowers do you want planted in the spring? Our ‘traditional contract’ needs clauses for every scenario. [Read more…]
Everyone knows why we do reliability, and reliability things like FMEAs. Customer experience. Organization reputation. Reduced warranty claims 10 years from now. But these are boring reasons that really don’t motivate me to take FMEAs seriously now. Why should I invest so much time into an activity that benefits the ‘company’ or the ‘customer’ in the future but won’t make an immediate difference when my boss will give me a ‘gold star’ on my next performance appraisal? Right? Wrong! [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss what it means to be ‘deterministic’ versus ‘probabilistic’ … and what that means for reliability engineering. Know what these words mean and want to learn more? Don’t know what these words mean and want to understand how they could help reliability engineering? Listen to this podcast.
ᐅ Play Episode
Chris and Fred discuss how you go about ‘hunting’ reliability training. And we do mean ‘hunt.’
ᐅ Play Episode
One of the enduring beauties and mysteries of reliability engineering is that there is no straight forward definition of who a reliability engineer is. Proactive, successful organizations, employ reliability engineers in many different and tailored ways. Reactive, ‘barely solvent’ organizations use reliability engineers as over-qualified auditors, expected to clap system configurations through design review gates as quickly and quietly as possible.
So what does this mean for you and your reliability engineering career? Are you in a position now that you are not entirely happy with? Are you in an industry on a downward trend … meaning that sooner or later you need to move to a greener pasture? Or do you want to become a better version of yourself and feel more valued than you currently do? [Read more…]
