Blog - Accendo Reliability

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…]

by Robert Allen 2 Comments

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:

[Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

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…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

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…]

by Perry Parendo Leave a Comment

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…]

by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment

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…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

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…]

by Ash Norton Leave a Comment

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…]

by Dennis Craggs Leave a Comment

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.

[Read more…]

by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

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…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

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…]

by Perry Parendo Leave a Comment

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…]

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment

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

by Robert Allen Leave a Comment

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.

[Read more…]