Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
The foundations of systems thinking and facilitation apply to business cases because the analysis requires a group to establish the nature of separate and inter-related components. This article discusses five ways to effectively facilitate business cases by conducting pre-session exchanges, asking powerful questions, using exercises that engage, anticipating disruption, and controlling the tempo.
![Is There Really a Direct Correlation Between Reliability & Safety?[Updated]](https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/accendo-media/wp-media-folder-accendo-reliability/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Clocher.Saint_.Menoux.3300x300T-150x150.png)
Safety is often directly correlated with system or component reliability. Is that really the case?
Find out what the experts and their data really says.
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Adopting the business strategy of intentionally tightening process and work quality standards will drive operating profits higher. You get most operating profits when process and work quality variables are sitting on their optimal cost points. The Taguchi Loss Functions of your operation show the connection between your operating costs and your process and work quality.
Keywords: Taguchi Loss Function, quality verses cost, Quality Cost Function
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What does the future hold for project management? Remote and flexible work arrangements were trends prior to COVID-19. The pandemic greatly accelerated the trends and a lot of it will be permanent well after the virus is tamed. Remote work arrangement means any work you do that dose not require commuting into an office. A flexible work arrangement are alternate arrangements or schedules from the traditional working day and week. Employees may choose a different work schedule to meet personal or family needs
This paper discusses the risks these changes will have on project management for future work. It does not present new technologies and the risks they will impose on projects. This is a subject for another paper.
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I’ve driven this route at least 3,000 times in the last 12 years. If you asked me if I would ever see a Tupperware-bowl-full of cut honeydew melon…or a pair of sneakers and an orange sitting atop a highway barrier, I would have said “𝘯𝘰.”
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I recently came across a report from European Gas Pipeline Incident Data Group (EGIG) titled “Safety Performance Determines The Acceptability of Cross Country Gas Transmission Systems”. The paper presents incident data contributed by six European gas transmission operators over a 30-year period of 1970-2001.
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During a recent webinar I presented with SMRP, entitled “Root Cause Analysis: It’s a Money Maker, Not a Money Taker”, I was fortunate to have many deep thinkers in my virtual audience.
They floated some questions related to conducting ‘RCA’s on non-mechanical situations. To my fellow veterans in this RCA space, this is a relatively easy question to properly address, but it did get me to thinking. I think those of us who do this for a living, take for granted that we know a properly facilitated RCA, can apply to any undesirable outcome, no matter the industry or the bad outcome.
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The foundations of systems thinking and facilitation apply to capital programs because the analysis requires a group to establish the nature of separate and inter-related components (the projects). This article discusses five ways to effectively facilitate capital programs prioritization by conducting pre-session exchanges, asking powerful questions, using exercises that engage, anticipating disruption, and controlling the tempo. [Read more…]
This piece will examine how the move away from quality management to risk management in United Kingdom local governments developed and how risk management became a mandate. It will then move to the specific by looking at Cheltenham Borough Council’s risk management policy and aspects of the 2018 Audit Committee Annual Risk Management Report. It will close with some observation on where risk and quality management are being used together.
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Dust ingress into bearings is one of the great causes of premature bearing failure on bucket elevators. By selecting the right bearing housing and position, combined with this special dust seal arrangement, you can get quadruple the bearing life. The article provides the full details of the low pressure dust leak seal design along with a sketch of the successful set-up.
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Can’t you make better decisions informed by good evidence? If not, it may be that your data isn’t fit for its intended purpose.
In the first part of this blog mini-series, I point out that the data in Maintenance Management Systems are very often “unfit for purpose” and I list several reasons for “why”.
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Aside from meeting specific quality system standard requirements—such as those found in ISO 9001 or IATF 16949—well-designed quality system metrics also can serve as meaningful indicators of the strengths and weaknesses of an organization’s various processes.
As a quality manager, I often consider how precisely our quality system objectives and other metrics describe the effectiveness of our systems. One metric I started using recently—overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)—has provided our management team with a composite measurable that encompasses three major branches of our operation: maintenance, production and quality.
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Eric Lof was born and educated in Sweden, moved to the United States in 1902, and worked for the Western Electric and General Electric Companies. Eric Lof published a series of articles on hydroelectric plants in 1913 in the Engineering Magazine. The Engineering Magazine helped spread the concepts of planning, efficiency, and scientific management. The magazine, for example, published the first Gantt charts in 1910.
Biofuel production and manufacturing facilities in the United States are increasing rapidly. On August 8, 2005, President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (H.R. 6) into law. The comprehensive energy legislation includes a nationwide renewable fuels standard (RFS) that will double the use of ethanol and biodiesel by 2012.
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This article discusses five ways to effectively facilitate block diagrams by conducting pre-session exchanges, asking powerful questions, using exercises that engage, anticipating disruption, and controlling the tempo. The foundations of systems thinking and facilitation apply to block diagrams because the analysis requires a group to establish the nature of separate and inter-related components.
