Blog - Accendo Reliability

Unit 1: Solving the Airline Industry’s Crisis – The Birth of Reliability Centered Maintenance

RCM in a Nutshell | Free RCM Overview Course – Understand the RCM Process, what RCM (really ) is, How to Apply it Properly, and What Can Be Achieved

Welcome to Hartley Whitney, England—a charming town dating back to the 12th century, whose enduring beauty inspires our discussion on Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). In this first unit of our RCM overview course, we explore the pressing issues that gave birth to RCM over 50 years ago in the commercial airline industry. Discover how catastrophic failures led to groundbreaking research, revealing that equipment failure behaves in unexpectedly random patterns, contrary to the then-prevailing belief that failures mainly occurred due to aging. This revelation paved the way for the development of RCM principles, fundamentally changing maintenance strategies to better align with reality. Join me in this picturesque setting as we delve into the history and transformation brought about by RCM.

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by JD Solomon Leave a Comment

The FINESSE Accessibility Checklist Removes a Pervasive Communication Barrier

Accessibility improves clarity for everyone. The Communicating with FINESSE® Accessibility Checklist is a practical tool to make technical presentations and reports accessible to individuals with visual and hearing impairments. The checklist is part of the broader FINESSE framework—an acronym for Frame, Illustrate, Noise Reduction, Empathy, Structure, Synergy, and Ethics—designed to help technical professionals communicate more effectively with senior decision-makers.

Three pervasive communication barriers are accessibility, language, and generational differences. Addressing accessibility is the first big step, and arguably the most important, for knocking down all three barriers.

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by Chris Weir Leave a Comment

Ethics in Reliability Engineering – Practical Dilemmas, not Theory

When people hear ethics, they often think of formal codes of conduct, professional standards, or exam topics. In reliability engineering, ethics is usually much more practical – and sometimes uncomfortable.

Ethical issues rarely present themselves as clear right or wrong decisions. They tend to appear as trade-offs, pressures and grey areas, often under time, cost or schedule constraints.

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by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

The People Skills of a Good Reliability Engineer

Having the technical and business skills is not sufficient to be a good reliability engineer.

You must also work with other people. With your peers, across the management team, with suppliers, contractors, and customers.

The ability to work well with others is often complex and situational. Being aware of a few basic skills will allow you to learn and improve. Prette and Prette define social competence as the social skills:

that meet the different inter-personal demands in the workplace in order to achieve the goals, preserve the well-being of the staff and respect the rights of each other.

A. Del Prette e Z. A. P. Del Prette, Psicologia das relações interpessoais: vivências para o trabalho em grupo, Vozes, Petrópolis, 2001.

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by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

Downtime Frequency and Duration

This article is adapted from Chapter 6 of my book, Measuring Manufacturing Effectiveness.

The book examines how manufacturing organizations define and use performance metrics, and how those measurement choices influence decisions, priorities, and behavior on the shop floor and in management. While the chapters are organized as a cohesive framework, each one is written to address a specific aspect of manufacturing effectiveness and can be read independently.

Chapter 6 focuses on a critical but often oversimplified topic: downtime.

Most organizations track downtime in some form, but far fewer distinguish meaningfully between how often downtime occurs and how long it lasts. These two dimensions — frequency and duration — are frequently combined, averaged, or summarized in ways that mask important operational realities.

This chapter explores why separating downtime frequency from downtime duration matters, how each dimension points to different underlying causes, and how failing to distinguish between them can lead to ineffective or misdirected improvement efforts.

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by Semion Gengrinovich Leave a Comment

Instilling Energy Confidence

EPRI: The Electric Power Research Institute

How safe and reliable are America’s electric power plants?

In 1973 the United States Senate held hearings on the lack of research and development in the power industry. In response, U.S. electric utilities dedicated resources to develop a nonprofit center for research—The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). EPRI was mandated with gathering technical experts and members of the electric power industry to work collaboratively on solutions to the challenges of the electric power industry. Among EPRI’s first priorities was an assessment of the reliability of nuclear power facilities with respect to their design, operation, and maintenance.

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by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Link Between Agile and Agility

Guest Post by Howard Wiener (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

In the previous article in this series, we discussed the difference between Agile and business agility and how Agile 2 addresses some of the omissions and failings of traditional Agile. Both Agile and Agile 2 focus on accelerating digital development; however, the benefits of any Agile approach can be obviated if it is not implemented within an agile management structure. Addressing execution issues, as Agile 2 does, will not be sufficient by itself to get you where you need to go.

Achieving business agility will also require that you reformulate your company into an agile organization capable of increasing the iteration speed of the Strategy-Execution Cycle we presented in the previous article. This article will focus on aspects of what that will look like.

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by Mike Sondalini 1 Comment

Advice to Engineers Thinking of Becoming a Maintenance Consultant

Here are some truths and hard-won learning for engineers thinking of becoming a Maintenance Consultant, or any other sort of consultant. There are important know-hows covered in this article that you need to understand if you want to build a maintenance consultancy that delivers you consistent cash flow. I could have written a lot more, but there are really only two determinants you must focus on to become a viable consultancy: marketing and innovation. Read about how Lifetime Reliability Solutions Consultants started and what we had to learn to to market ourselves and survive when the business plan turned out to be completely useless.

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by Nancy Regan Leave a Comment

College vs Trades: My Mother’s Lesson Changed Everything

At the SMRP Conference, a panel discussion about workforce development — and the value of college versus the trades — reminded me of a lesson I’ll never forget.

When everyone around me said I had to go to college, my mother said something that changed the course of my life forever.

In this story, I share a moment from high school that taught me the power of intuition, trust, and having someone who believes in you enough to say, “It’s okay to wait.”

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by JD Solomon Leave a Comment

Why Reliability Professionals Need a Default Ethical Framework

The time for reliability professionals to develop a default ethical framework is before the action occurs. Spend some time studying ethics. More importantly, watch the ethical practices of others in your organization. The great trusted advisors have a default ethical framework. Ethical communication is directly aligned with a reliability professional’s ethical framework.

Ethics are the way we make decisions.
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by Chris Weir Leave a Comment

Reliability Engineer – Roles and Responsibilities Across the Lifecycle

The role of the reliability engineer is often associated with specific activities or phases of the lifecycle, such as prediction during design, testing during development or data analysis in-service. In practice, reliability engineering is a through-life responsibility, even though its focus changes over time.

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by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

The Business Skills of a Good Reliability Engineer

Knowing how to estimate sample size or create a Weibull plot is not enough today.

Just having technical skills, while essential, is not sufficient.

Having a master of business administration (MBA) may be helpful, and it is not required; knowing the warranty and brand cost per failure is essential.

You also need to know which analysis to conduct and how it fits into the larger program and organization, plus how it impacts your customers. You also need to understand the business side of your work. [Read more…]

by Semion Gengrinovich Leave a Comment

The Great Chicago Flood

On April 13, 1992, water tore a 20-foot long hole through the wall of a tunnel 20 feet below the bed of the Chicago River, some 50 feet below downtown Chicago. Over 200 million gallons of water surged through an extensive series of underground tunnels, affecting over 30 major buildings including City Hall and the financial markets. Lower levels of major office high-rises held up to 40 feet of water, and the city center was evacuated out of fear that electrical or utility connection failures could endanger lives.

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by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

CEO Disruption

Lengthy reigns at the top may be the next thing to get disrupted.
Carol Ryan – Wall Street Journal Writer

What’s the CEOs role in VUCA time? What do you think? According to the Wall Street Journal. “Point people to the light at the end of the tunnel” (Crash Course in Crisis Management, Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2020)

Story: The challenge: some CEOs are unfit for VUCA duty. In other words, they are not ‘VUCA or future-ready’. Take a look at what investors say in the Self Disruptive Leader survey from Korn Ferry (BTW: Pre-COVID:

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Reliability Block Diagrams Introduction

Reliability Block Diagrams are a powerful reliability analysis tool. They are visual representation of reliability and risk that exists within machinery or work processes.

They allow the user to notate the reliability of each part or task and calculate the reliability for the whole scenario. The use of Reliability Block Diagrams extends to all aspects of operational processes and procedures, both as series and parallel arrangements.

Once a Reliability Block Diagram is created, you can do “what-if” scenarios to identify the defects that can happen to each part. This information allows you to then make informed decisions about to how to proactively eliminate the causes of each risk or defect, and by extension, eliminate that cause of failure.

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