Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
In the world of work, execution is key. It’s not just about having great ideas or making ambitious plans; it’s about turning those ideas into action and seeing plans through to completion. However, despite our best intentions, many of us struggle to execute work effectively. So, why is this? What causes the execution gap? Let’s explore some common reasons why people fail to execute work and how we can overcome these challenges.
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In this short video, I explain the concept of the P-F Interval and its crucial role in Condition Based Maintenance (CBM). Understanding the P-F Interval is essential for determining how often to perform CBM tasks (and Predictive Maintenance task intervals) to catch Potential Failures before they become full-blown failures. Learn how the time between detecting a Potential Failure Condition and the point of failure — known as the P-F Interval — guides your inspection intervals and helps ensure reliability.
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Communicating effectively is essential when big decisions are at hand, especially for reliability professionals presenting to senior management or boards. However, most of us do not receive formal training or have tailored strategies for big, high-stakes presentations. This guide offers three practical solutions to enhance your presentation skills.
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Reliability analysis is essential for ensuring long-term performance of hardware components. However, predicting failures with small sample sizes is a challenge. Traditional statistical methods often require large datasets, whereas Bayesian statistics can incorporate prior knowledge to improve predictions by updating beliefs as new data becomes available.
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Reliability Engineering analytics come with graphs and visual representations providing the analyst with various types of key information. Some graphs are more popular than others. This article highlights the 4 main graphs used in Reliability Engineering Analysis.
They are Reliability, Probability of Failure, Probability Density and Failure Rate. Less common types are not covered here. Such as Contour Plots. The basis of the graphs in this article is the Weibull Distribution. In other words, all the graphs derive from this very popular distribution. The same concepts applies to other distributions.
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Gage Repeatability and Reproducibility (GR&R) is a statistical tool used in quality control to assess a measurement system’s capability. It evaluates the amount of variation in the measurement data that is due to the measurement system itself, rather than the product being measured.
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Most of us have seen reliability specified using a requirement like the following:
The Zeus 5000 SUV shall have an MTBF of 144,269.5 miles with a 90% confidence.
Some readers may not have seen reliability requirements specified in any other way. What they have always seen has read something like: The widget shall have an MTBF of X with a Y% confidence. This reliability requirement structure is rather ubiquitous
in military and aerospace specifications, which along with Mil-HDBK-217, have been major influences in reliability specification practices for decades in many industries.
There are two basic types of contracts applied to development projects. They are Firm Fixed Price (FFP) and Cost-Plus (CP). Each type has a number of different variations shown in Table 1. FFP contracts are for projects with mature technology, less uncertainty, and more predictability. CP contracts are for projects with new technology, a lot of uncertainty, and less predicability. There are other types of contracts but are out of scope for this paper.
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How to conquer the last frontier in equipment reliability, maintenance, and industrial engineering asset management: Our machines and materials of construction do not cause our equipment problems and failures. The real problem for industry is the ‘human factor’ in stopping people making mistakes. You gain control over the ‘human factor’ by providing clear and comprehensive work procedures that explain exactly how to deliver the performance required and that give users the means to check and improve their performance. The Accuracy Controlled Enterprise 3T procedure layout and content lets you provide your people with the details of how to do their work with exceptional quality, and the means to correct and improve their efforts until they are that good.
[Read more…]Dear All, This is our fourth video on Accelerated Life Testing (ALT). Some of the viewers had requested for procedure to determine the Activation Energy used in Arrhenius Model. This video explains experimental procedure to determine Activation Energy. Hope you find this useful! If you like the video, click on the “Thumbs-up icon” and subscribe to our channel for more videos on Quality and Reliability!
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The real cost is not doing it. I have a free RCM Overview course on my channel. There is a playlist with 11 units.
Find the course at Start Here: Free RCM Course by Nancy Regan, “RCM in a Nutshell”.
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As reliability professionals, we’ve all had moments where our message falls flat, a misunderstanding occurs, or a simple conversation gets bogged down. It’s usually due to one of the big three barriers to effective communication: language, accessibility, and generational differences. The seven cause-and-effect factors (the “bones” of FINESSE) are designed to overcome all three barriers. However, it’s important to understand the context of each of the three barriers. Here’s a quick look at each one.
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In reliability engineering and data-driven maintenance strategies, understanding different failure modes is crucial for designing robust systems. Survival analysis is a powerful statistical tool that allows us to analyze time-to-event data and assess the reliability of components over time. In this article, we’ll explore how survival analysis can be applied to multi-modal failure scenarios using R.
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Accelerated life testing, ALT, is a method used in reliability engineering to assess the lifespan and performance of a product under accelerated stress conditions. The goal is to uncover potential faults and failures in a shorter time frame than would be possible under normal operating conditions. ALT is particularly useful when the product’s expected lifespan is long and waiting for failures to occur naturally is not feasible.
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After a discussion with a client this morning, and their motor vendor’s reliability engineer asked for a reference for a sample size calculation formula I recommended, I had a short email exchange with said reliability engineer. In my note with the references, I included an aside with a link to this site. He liked the site and agreed that MTBF was often misunderstood and not useful. He asked if the store sold much in the way of NoMTBF logo’ed merchandise – it doesn’t btw. I thought about how and why this site and the store exist and that invited my passion on this topic once again.
We need to do something to further the eradication of MTBF.
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