Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
THE Plant Wellness Way EAM SYSTEM-OF-RELIABILITY METHODOLOGY ENSURES YOU ALWAYS HAVE LOW MAINTENANCE COSTS AS PART OF THE WORLD CLASS MAINTENANCE, RELIABILITY AND LIFE CYCLE ASSET MANAGEMENT SUCCESS YOU GET
BELOW ARE 14 STRATEGIES A PLANT WELLNESS WAY EAM SYSTEM-OF-RELIABILITY BRINGS YOU THAT ENSURE THE LEAST MAINTENANCE COSTS FOREVERMORE.
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Many larger companies have three critically important operations: organizational sustainability, procurement, and supply chain management. IN most companies, these operations are managed separate from each other, and their operations are not directly influenced by international standards.
Organizational sustainability works to improve all the operations of the company. However, these operations are managed internal to the organization. There may be a sustainability plan for the organization, but it is not used in all facilities or in the same manner for many of the facilities. The corporate sustainability program creates its own program based on how the sustainability manager works with operations. This will be coming to an end as the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) is preparing to release mandatory reporting to provide information to the capital markets.
[Read more…]“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing” – Warren Buffett
In this article, I will outline how to evaluate an FMEA against the FMEA Quality Objective for identifying high-risk failures.
One definition for “risk” is “the possibility of loss or injury;” and “high” means “of a greater degree, amount or cost than expected.” Putting these words together, “high risk” means the anticipated loss or injury is too great. [Read more…]
Dear friends, I am happy to release this video on Introduction to Robust Design. In this video, I have briefly explained the philosophy of robust design which was originally created by Dr.Genichi Taguchi. It includes Taguchi’s definition of quality, the quality loss function, Signal to Noise Ratios (SN Ratio), Parameter Diagram, Steps in Robust Design, and an illustration of calculation of SN ratio.
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Hi everyone! In this video, I’m sharing some key insights from the CMC Colombia 2024 conference, where I attended presentations by Ramesh Gulati and Doc Palmer. Ramesh spoke about KPIs and the importance of considering people, not just equipment. Doc Palmer highlighted valuable lessons about planning and scheduling, emphasizing that things don’t have to be perfect to get the job done.
Join me and Doc Palmer as we wrap up the conference with some great takeaways!
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In today’s global economy, supply chain disruptions are inevitable. Companies must proactively plan for resilience and adaptability, whether due to geopolitical tensions, tariffs, component shortages, or factory challenges.
Product Realization Group’s veteran hardware and operations experts Michael Keer, Founder and Managing Partner, and Wayne Miller, New Product Development and Introduction, shared their insights on mitigating supply chain risk, drawing from decades of experience in manufacturing, operations, and supplier management. Below, we outline seven key strategies to safeguard your supply chain and keep your production on track.
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I learned actuarial methods for forecasting and spares planning while working for the US Air Force Logistics Command in the 1970s [AFLCM 66-17 and AFM 400-1]. I am grateful for the education, and I am sorry to report that the USAF has reverted to MTBF management.
The US AFLC actuarial methods were developed for engine management in the 1960s by RAND Corp. [Giesler] They estimated age-interval failure rates and made actuarial forecasts of engine demands depending on the flying-hour program plan. An actuarial forecast is ∑a(s)n(t-s), s=1,2,…,t, where a(s) is actuarial failure rate conditional on survival to age s and n(t-s) is the installed base of age t-s. Periodic meetings consolidated engine lifetime and failure data into agreements on actuarial failure rates, for forecasting engine demands and for war readiness spares requirements.
The USAF actuarial methods assume constant failure rates within short age intervals, Poisson demands, and ignore variance induced by variable flying hours per aircraft in the flying hour program. I later figured out how to estimate actuarial failure rates for all engines, major modules, and their service parts, with or without life-limits and without lifetime data; I computed the distribution of demand forecasts, not Poisson. I offered to show AFIT faculty, AFOSR, AFRL, and RAND how to extend actuarial methods to all service parts [George, 1993].
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A conversation the other day involved how or why someone would use the mean of a set of data described by a Weibull distribution.
The Weibull distribution is great at describing a dataset that has a decreasing or increasing hazard rate over time. Using the distribution we also do not need to determine the MTBF (which is not all that useful, of course).
Walking up the stairs today, I wondered if the arithmetic mean of the time to failure data, commonly used to estimate MTBF, is the same as the mean of the Weibull distribution. Doesn’t everyone think about such things?
Doesn’t everyone think about such things? So, I thought, I’d check. Set up some data with an increasing failure rate, and calculate the arithmetic mean and the Weibull distribution mean. [Read more…]
Early in my quality management career, while working at a small extrusion and fabrication company, I learned something important: bosses pay attention to the money. And if I focused on cost savings projects, I could stay on their good side.
Most of my cost savings efforts at that time focused on eliminating specific types of defects. After all, even a low-frequency defect—especially one that reaches a customer—can drive substantial savings once resolved. Other projects looked inward, targeting inefficiencies in our systems and practices. Lab procedures, control plans, and audit schedules tend to drift out of sync with the products and processes they’re supposed to control. So every now and then, a little system hygiene—an organized cleanup—can free up resources and allow you to reallocate attention to where it’s needed most.
It was during one of those hygiene projects that I stumbled into something I’ve since come to call The Paradox of Invisible Discipline.
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The power of historical failure data is a gold mine of information for reliability engineers. It provides a window into the life cycle of products, revealing patterns and trends that can inform future designs and manufacturing processes. By analyzing this data, we can identify common failure modes, detect early life failures indicating quality or production issues, determine the onset of wear-out stages, and predict time to failure for similar products.
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When you do a Root Cause Failure Analysis or a 5- Why there are no promises that you will actually find the true root cause and fix your problem. Investigating the cause of a failure is fraught with traps, such as making wrong assumptions, insufficient evidence, misinterpreting the evidence, misunderstanding, personal bias and second-guessing. There are necessary issues you need to be aware of that affect the RCA and 5-Why methods, and there are some good practices that you can adopt to improve your chance of doing a successful analysis when applied to equipment failures.
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If colleges were businesses they would be right for hostile takeovers, complete with serious costcutting and painful reorganizations.
US News and World Report
COVID has forced universities to do online teaching. What’s the value add of spending $70K (USD) for online instruction, when you paid for sports, in-class instruction, and the college experience? In 2021 and 2022, we’ll find out as university students who have been taught online for a year or even longer.
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Today’s Gremlin – “The White Knight”, is a day-to-day hero, fixing what’s broken and returning the operation from panic. When things break, you really do need him, and he can be a hero, but couldn’t he be preventing those breakdowns?
The White Knight is the one you call when things have gone wrong. You need things fixed fast, regardless of the time of day, and he’s there for you. He works overtime if needed, he’s there when you need him, and he’s fast. Things do get fixed. But do they stay that way?
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In any organization, the absence of clear direction can lead to confusion, inefficiency, and stagnation. Direction setting—the process of defining a vision, establishing goals, and communicating a clear path forward—is one of the most critical functions of leadership. When done effectively, it empowers teams, drives progress, and ensures that everyone is working toward a shared purpose.
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Dear friends, we are happy to release this 85th video in our channel ‘Institute of Quality and Reliability’! In this video, Hemant Urdhwareshe has explained the concept of statistical tolerancing tolerance stack-up! Conventional Extreme Value Analysis (EVA) can result in increased manufacturing costs! Statistical tolerancing is more optimistic method of analysing tolerances and can reduce manufacturing costs! Concepts of loop diagram, additivity of variances are also explained briefly in the video with a practical application case study of tolerance stack-up analysis.
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