Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
When I caught my husband cheating, I learned the two criteria for scheduling a maintenance task. Satisfy these two criteria to create an optimized maintenance plan. [Read more…]
There are many scenarios that can arise throughout product development programs. There is one in particular that I have seen unfold more than once: I call it the “Plus one program.” Don’t let the name fool you; it’s horrible to watch unfold.
A startup or established player introduces an impressive jump in industry-standard technology, or sometimes an established player introduces an innovation to their industry. Since the technology is so innovative, there is great value in getting it to market quickly even if it isn’t a mature design. In this case, it is actually a smart move to go to market with a device that doesn’t have “ideal reliability.” In other words, the value of getting it out there quickly is worth the field issues. Those issues will be tolerated by the customer as well, if the technology is that good.
The majority of times that a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is ‘required’ is often due to some type of threshold of pain being met. Someone is hurt, we’ve had an environmental excursion, we lost a lot of money in throughput or equipment damage, we violated some regulation, etc. Essentially, when the ‘suits’ show up, something bad has happened and we will do an RCA whether we like it or not. This is the basis of ‘reactive RCA’, where we respond to an incident that has already met certain defined requirements, often called ‘triggers’. [Read more…]
A recent student of mine was an engineer for a rail corporation. Let’s call her Liz. Liz kept asking me ‘what do I need to put in a contract’ to make sure my suppliers take reliability seriously? She kept asking this over, and over, until I got the penny to drop. Liz eventually realized that she was the one who had to take it seriously. [Read more…]
One of the enjoyable parts of reliability engineering work is the consistent need to learn. We learn how new materials, designs, applications, and systems work, and fail. Sometimes we learn through proactive characterization studies, sometimes via unwanted field failures.
Failures will occur, it is what we learn from them that matters. The ability to gather and remember the lessons learned is a common and ongoing need for every organization. We are not very good at it, in general. [Read more…]
If you were to go into your CMMS and look at the hierarchy and equipment, would it be well laid out and organized? Would you be able to drill down the to the lowest level of components to know what failures have occurred? Can you see how pumps are performing across a specific area or the entire plant? The chances are that for many organizations, this is not possible. Why is that? The asset hierarchy was not thought out ahead of time, nor was the right data collected and recorded in the CMMS.
Having a well-defined asset hierarchy is critical to the ability of the plant to drill down in costs and identify where the improvements efforts should be focused. It also allows reliability staff to identify common issues across specific equipment types and classes, enabling what may be an improvement targeted for a specific area to be spread out across the site. [Read more…]
Have faith to seize on opportunities that come your way (but the risk is within us!)
Everyone has opportunities. But it is up to us to seize the opportunities that come our way!
There will be opportunities to build lives, to better ourselves, or to serve the community.
Faith and opportunities
Faith is the complete trust or confidence in someone or something. It is the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. Faith is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us, even though we cannot see it up ahead. [Read more…]
One of the common misunderstandings about business profit among non-finance professionals is that it there is more than one way to define it.
At its core, profit is calculated as Revenue minus Costs. If you bought a bicycle at a yard sale for $50, then sold it a week later on Craigslist for $80, your profit is $30. In a simple transaction, profit is easily understood. But within an organization, different types of profits have to be defined to better understand the flow of money through it. [Read more…]
In the field, we know that there are no “quick fixes” or “silver bullet solutions” when it comes to improvements in maintenance management. Many separate conditions and events must come together properly to achieve “schedule success” – i.e.: the high level of compliance to a schedule of planned work as produced by your planners. [Read more…]
Is your organization best suited for a cloud based CMMS or on-premise maintenance software? As the price of bandwidth and storage continues to decrease, cloud-based maintenance software is becoming an increasingly popular choice. Many cloud-based CMMS/EAM software vendors are pushing this technology as a convenient and cost-effective alternative to traditional, on-premise software, but cloud-based solutions aren’t necessarily right for everyone. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution, so you would be better off exploring the pros and cons of cloud-based vs on-premise CMMS options before committing to any particular technology. [Read more…]
Just as trees grow and change, so do circumstances that affect our equipment. That’s why it’s important to do this from time to time… [Read more…]
Graphs contain information and often tell a story. Our interpretation of the graphic can be aided or hindered by the design or style of the plot. Cleveland and McGill (1984) studied graphical perception and found the use of dot plots to aid viewers to understand the data’s message clearly.
The nature of a dot plot is like a bar chart, yet without the bars. Less ink, just a dot to indicate count or position along an axis permits conveying information simply. Due to its simplicity, it also permits adding additional information useful for comparisons or spotting trends, and more. [Read more…]
Uncertainty is another word for risk. Reliability uncertainty or risk is neither good nor bad, it just a bit unknown. Until we know the outcome, the eventual reliability performance, we will not know the impact.
So, how do we deal with reliability uncertainty? Will our product or system work as expected over time, or will it fail? Let’s examine a few of the common approaches in use and when and why the approach is effective. [Read more…]
In last month’s introductory article, we discussed some of the barriers to selling not only the concept of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) but also the recommendations generated as a result of these analyses. We also laid the framework for making better predictions by generating and accessing better data—namely predicting our Mean Time between Failure (MTBF) and Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) earlier and, therefore, implementing a fix faster.
Given this background, let’s explore how we can now justify conducting a RCA and implementing the recommendations as a result of the analysis. By and far, conducting a true RCA is viewed as luxury not a necessity. Think about the objections we hear when we offer the idea of gathering RCA teams. What follows is a list of common objections to RCA accompanied by rational justifications that any manager can employ. [Read more…]
In the article Reliability in Equipment Design it was stated that a project team can set reliability target(s) for new equipment using historical reliability data. One option OEMs have for capturing historical reliability data is a Failure Reporting And Corrective Action System, or FRACAS. The data captured can provide a comprehensive view of how the equipment is performing. This data can be used to improve legacy equipment and drive decision-making on new equipment. [Read more…]
