How does someone address the critical question of how many parts are needed for a test? We cover the balance between math and experience. [Read more…]
How Many Parts Do I Need?
How to Sustain the Culture Change
The key to keeping a culture change from going back
One of the reasons that culture changes fail to change and stay that way is because there is nothing put in place to sustain it. When there is no plan to sustain the change, it will be a flavor of the week and revert back to the old ways. This is the final installment of a series on culture change and if you haven’t already, please go to the first post and start there. [Read more…]
Root Cause Analysis Answers Your Problems
What you will learn from this article.
- An explanation of root causes analysis (RCA)
- An overview of how it is applied at your work place.
- See the result of a sample RCA.
Root Cause Analysis is a step by step method that leads to the discovery of a fault’s first or root cause. Every equipment failure happens for a number of reasons. There is a definite progression of actions and consequences that lead to a failure. An RCA investigation traces the cause and effect trail from the end failure back to the root cause. Much like a detective solving a crime. [Read more…]
Top Engineers to Follow on LinkedIn
Although I’ve had a profile for about six years, I really only got engaged and active on LinkedIn a little over a year ago. And since then I’ve been compiling a list of the Top Engineers to Follow on LinkedIn.
With “marketers” and “influencers” in every corner of LinkedIn, I caught myself wondering, “Where are all my engineers at?”
And I have to tell you it felt pretty lonely.
Don’t get me wrong – there are some AMAZING, diverse, non-engineers that I’ve met and learned from via LinkedIn. [Read more…]
FMEA Q and A – addressing errant cleaning operation in Process FMEA
FMEA Q and A
What if a production worker uses a different cleaning method for an assembly operation than was outlined in the operation work instructions, and the result is customer complaints and field issues. How could this be addressed in a Process FMEA? This question is discussed and answered in this FMEA Q and A article.
“I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew.”
Thabo Mbeki
[Read more…]
The Central Limit Theorem
Introduction
In some of my articles, I have referred to The Central Limit Theorem, a development in probability theory. It can be stated
“When independent identically distributed random variables are added, their normalized sum tends toward a normal distribution (informally a “bell curve”) even if the original variables themselves are not normally distributed.”
We can apply this principle to many practical problems to analyze the distribution of the sample mean. In this article, I provide graphical and mathematical descriptions and a practical example.
Wrecking a Mature PdM Program
The phone conversation starts with the words “Doug, I’ve got a big problem and I’m hoping you’ll be able to give me some insight as to how to resolve it.”
The call comes from a long-time client and someone I consider a friend. We not only worked together to start RCM effort at his company, we’ve hunted, golfed and attended a few sporting events together. Someone who if I’m working in his part of the country or just driving through I make a point to make a call so we can get together to and catch up on our lives. [Read more…]
The Low Bid: Who’s Risk?
Guest Post by Malcolm Peart (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
The Low Bid: Who’s Risk?
We live in a competitive environment and business generates the money that makes the world go round, or at least should do. Money is the medium of exchange for goods and services and allows society as we know it and the global economy to function.
Those who have money engage those who want money to provide them with products or services and this is done through contracts. Contracts are awarded at a price that the person who has the money (the Client) is prepared to pay and ‘the winner’ is typically the lowest compliant bid.
If compliance isn’t met then there is suffering somewhere. It can be the Client, the Bidder, the end user or all three and on Government projects it’s the taxpayer who, inevitably, pays. [Read more…]
Are We There Yet?
Very often I hear New Product Development teams say “we are almost there.” Yet they can be in this condition for months or years. Using a DOE approach can accelerate to the design point. When something has hit the wall, this has been the best approach I have found to create a break through in development. [Read more…]
Anchoring Methodology Presentation at ARDC 2018
I just finished my talk today at the Applied Reliability and Durability Conference in Portland Oregon. A great conference in a fun city. My topic was “Reliability Test and Analysis with Intent.” I explain a technique I have developed called “Anchoring” which ensures that reliability tools maintain connectivity to program phases throughout product development. Enjoy!
-Adam
Agile Requirements Discovery and Validation
Many companies pursue a product development strategy that provides a product (or service) which meets customer needs sooner (rather than later), and then makes adjustments after the product has been fielded.
Pursuing this approach means accepting the associated risks. What if a critical to quality or critical to reliability characteristic fails to meet customer needs? A product could fail miserably by eliminating important product development work scope and accelerating time-to-market. By the time an adjustment or “pivot” can be made it may be too late, or too costly to correct.
The Actions To Accelerate Your Culture Change
Hit the ground running and embed the culture change to achieve maximum results
Your culture change has a plan, it has the right people in place, and you are ready to roll it out. Your change stands a better chance of success than most change programs as you have a plan with the right people. Sometimes changes fail because the change is not embedded quickly, people lose interest and go back to their old ways. If you haven’t already, please start at the beginning of the series with the warning signs that you need a culture change. [Read more…]
Cyclone Separators — an overview
What you will learn from this article.
- How cyclones and hydrocyclones work.
- Where cyclones are used.
- Design features that affect cyclones.
- How to get long life from cyclones.
A tornado can lift cars from the ground and hurl them hundreds of meters away. Chickens and ducks can be hurled kilometers away. The story of fish falling from the sky is explained by the power of a tornado to lift materials kilometers into the sky. The spinning vortex of air separates and segregates heavy and light objects. The heavy objects drop out sooner and the light objects are carried further. Cyclone separators and hydrocyclones work the same way. [Read more…]
The Non-parametric Friedman Test
The Friedman test is a non-parametric test used to test for differences between groups when the dependent variable is at least ordinal (could be continuous). The Friedman test is the non-parametric alternative to the one-way ANOVA with repeated measures (or the complete block design and a special case of the Durbin test). If the data is significantly different than normally distributed this becomes the preferred test over using an ANOVA.
The test procedure ranks each row (block) together, then considers the values of ranks by columns. The data is organized in to a matrix with B rows (blocks) and T columns (treatments) with a single operation in each cell of the matrix. [Read more…]
Coaching Works
A coach is an external set of eyes and ears. They will break down the way you do things and assist with building it up better.
In many disciplines our learning curve rolls over to a plateau as the years pass. Finding ways to continue to improve can be difficult. The traditional, methods of education, formal training, and self directed improvement take significant time investment.
Coaching is not training. Training is pre-constructed material. Coaching is an observation and prescriptive method for improvement.
