Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
“A failure analysis is a waste of resources. We know why it failed. We need to move on.”
If you have participated in a failure analysis, you have likely heard the preceding comments, and been told to fix the problem ASAP. You make a change, but the same failure re-surfaces and you are in the hot seat again. What can you do to improve the failure analysis process in the future? Let us begin by reviewing some realities of failures. [Read more…]
Improving the reliability of performed maintenance work helps in the refinement and improvement of policies that shape a cost-effective maintenance strategy that aims to address dominant causes of asset failure.
Before we continue, we have to define how reliable maintenance looks like. In the context of this article, we will define it as consistently performing adequate maintenance in the required time frame. In other words, it means performing good maintenance work while respecting due dates.
The risk of a pandemic is not an unknown unknown. In the 2019 World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report it ranked at a less than average likelihood with a more than average impact. Not a bad assessment but the causes and consequences are difficult to evaluate. There is a barrage of statistical data by country; a lack of knowledge and changing opinions which generates misinformation that is then clouded by journalistic sensationalism in the hunt for yet more breaking news and a spot on the TV. [Read more…]
Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) was developed in the airline industry to be used for developing maintenance programs for new aircraft. There’s no doubting it – originally RCM was intended for new designs and arguably where the results of failure could be catastrophic, specifically the loss of life and where costs of maintaining had grown ridiculously high. Aircraft maintenance costs had indeed grown very high by the 1960’s and 70’s before RCM came along. In fact, one of the big drivers behind RCM was cost reduction. It worked too – in both the aerospace and nuclear power industries! Safety and other benefits were there too, but they were not primary drivers. Then, as today, cost was the problem that got the attention. [Read more…]
Watch how my refrigerator…(make that THREE refrigerators)…reminded me about Potential Failure Conditions and the Consequences of Failure. I explain why I ignored a Potential Failure Condition coming from my refrigerator and chose to act “reactively” instead of “proactively.” [Read more…]
I often ask my classes ‘If we follow our procedures to the letter, do nothing more and nothing less; would we optimize our system productivity, safety and reliability?’ The answer is NO. [Read more…]
by Alan Ross
As professionals in the field of electrical system reliability, we have a choice.
We can follow the leaders, or we can follow the losers.
It may seem harsh to say that there are “losers” out there, because that’s one of the words that nobody likes to hear. Well, I don’t mean “loser” in the same way kids do when they hold up an “L” on their foreheads on the playground (see above). I mean it in the literal sense. A loser is someone who has experienced loss. [Read more…]
“My software never has bugs. It just develops random features.” Anonymous
More and more mechanical and electrical systems include software integration. The FMEA methodology applies very well to software as well as hardware. It is possible to include software functionality in the System FMEA as part of the functional descriptions. However, for complex software functionality such as embedded control systems, it may be useful to perform a separate software FMEA.
Depreciation is one of the more poorly understood, yet commonly encountered terms in managerial accounting. In accounting lingo, depreciation is the systematic allocation of the cost of an asset across its useful life. That’s a mouthful. But breaking down the definition into simpler terms helps explain how its used and why it’s important when conducting Return on Investment Analysis. [Read more…]
It is undoubtedly and incontrovertibly true that global extreme poverty has declined as capitalism has driven globalization – the trade between and among nations – to increase over time. Certainly, there are arguments to be made that the growth in wealth has also been increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer people, but the world as a whole has benefited. The charts below from Our World in Data, showing the number of people living in extreme poverty from 1820 to present, clearly demonstrate that the economic benefit of globalization has been as positive as it has been apparent [Read more…]
Educational institutions realize that we all learn differently and combinations of learning styles will reach most of us. Some of us learn by seeing (reading), some by doing (tactile), some by hearing (aural). Most of us have a bit of each of these and rarely only one is enough. In college and university there is reading as well as assignment and lab work. We need both, so, how do we learn once we leave the academic world? [Read more…]
Often, when the completion of a task or deliverable is needed, a meeting is a good way to establish mutual understanding of the way forward. With many resources working remote these days, effective meetings are taking on even greater importance.
Just like the “Welcome to Las Vegas sign” has stood the test time, so has RCM. In this video, I explain how we’ve never needed RCM more than we do right now… [Read more…]
“It was supposed to work in our application. This failure is going to cost us a lot of rig time.”
Was this product checked out prior to purchase? Was it fit-for-purpose? Some due diligence was probably used, but the better question is…was the product assessed through Design Assurance? Design assurance is an engineering process that confirms the product meets performance requirements and complies with design policies and industry standards. [Read more…]
The graphic of the Swiss Cheese Model (attached is an expression from AHRQ) is a good one and one that many will remember and relate to.
However, I would like to expand on that model and express that more commonly, there is a not a singular or linear path to failure. There are typically multiple paths of failure that converge together at some point in time to cause an undesirable outcome. [Read more…]
