Communication is essential for coaching and team success. This framework has helped us work with players in the short time of a basketball camp. A similar approach is used when working with business clients. [Read more…]
3 Cs of Communication
No. 1 Business Risk for 2018
What do you think is the #1 business risk in 2018 according to the World Economic Forum?
- Weapons of mass destruction? It’s #29.
- Natural catastrophes? It’s # 19.
- Cyber attacks? It’s #8. We’re getting closer.
Guess again? [Read more…]
Using the Maintenance Data You Already Have
Leverage the existing data in your CMMS to make sustainable improvements to your maintenance program
Let’s face it, your technicians have been entering data into the CMMS for years, but you haven’t been able to use it to make improvements. Is it because the data isn’t codified or it doesn’t have the right data points? Generally, this is how most maintenance managers will view their data, but it is incorrect. The CMMS does have data that you can use almost immediately. [Read more…]
Control Loops — Masters of Automatic Control
What you will learn from this article.
- Control loops automatically correct unwanted changes in a process.
- A control loop consists of components to detect and adjust the process.
- Control loop complexity reflects the accuracy and speed of control.
- Explanation of ‘open loop’, ‘closed loop’, ‘feed back’, ‘feed forward’.
The sole purpose of using process control in, say, the making of beer, is to detect what is happening during manufacture and to decide if something needs to be changed to insure the beer meets the necessary specification. The key words are ‘to detect’, ‘to decide’, ‘to change’ and ‘to meet specification’. A control loop can do all these things automatically. [Read more…]
Lessons from Scrum for Product Development Teams
In a previous article, we explored agile product development with a focus on early product validation.
There are additional key enablers from agile/scrum that can be borrowed and applied to any product development process, however.
In this article, we’ll compare and contrast the role & responsibility for scrum masters vs. project managers/core team leaders.
Let’s start with (all) the basic scrum roles:
Stop Wasting My Time! The War on N-VAN!
Some incredible things seem to happen as you get older. When I was in my early twenties I had very little patience for small children. They were always making noise making a mess and demanding attention. I had all kinds of patience for work related things, if we were having a meeting on what caused our chemical reaction times to drift more than a full standard deviation outside the control limits, you had 100% of my attention. [Read more…]
Who Wins: The Machine or the Human?
There is a huge fear around the globe that:
The Machines Are Coming!
How much is this reality, fear, or over hype?
Upcoming Machine and robot wars are posed this way.
The machines are fully functional robots that can out-think and out-do all humans. Where has this fantasy been created? TV. Movies. Books. And frankly most media make a robot a villain who kills and takes over humanity.
Now, they are seen as job killers and we all need to be afraid.
So, what’s going on? This is: Part myth. Part reality. [Read more…]
How Many Parts Do I Need?
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 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…]
