NTSB has issued seven safety recommendations following the September, 2010 San Bruno incident in California.
[Read more…]NTSB Safety Recommendations Following San Bruno Incident
1833 Faraday and a HALT Experiment on Dry Rot
Accelerated life tests are used to help predict the rate of failure of components. Capacitors are frequent victims of accelerated life testing, and have a distant relationship with one of the earliest documented accelerated life tests: the unit of capacitance, the farad, is named for Sir Michael Faraday.
Michael Faraday remains one of the most important scientists of all time. He made foundational discoveries in electricity, magnetism, and electrochemistry. Today, Faraday is less well known for documenting the Royal Navy’s results of accelerated life tests on dry rot of wood.
[Read more…]Reliability Engineers: Use Caution When Using Readability Formulas like Flesch Reading Ease
Readability formulas determine how easily a specific audience can understand a text. There are more than a dozen readability formulas, such as Flesch Reading Ease, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG), the Gunning-FOG Index, and the Coleman-Liau Index. Many Google, Microsoft, and Adobe products have a built-in readability formula. Editing tools such as Grammarly do, too. The one big thing to remember is that too much attention to readability scores does not mean your writing is easier to comprehend or understand.
How it Works
Most readability formulas use some combination of sentence length, the average number of words per sentence, the average number of characters per word, or the number of words with three or more syllables. You can use the formulas to score text by hand. The results from these formulas are often given as a grade level, such as “4th grade” or “12th grade.”
[Read more…]The Plant Wellness Way Difference
The Plant and Equipment Wellness Way was designed to quickly create Operational Excellence success. You can only get the Plant Wellness Way from LRS Operational Excellence Consultants.
[Read more…]Knowledge: Cornerstone of Human Capital
Article first posted at Conscious Reliability by James Reyes-Picknell, Jesus Sifonte, and team.
Managing assets to make them deliver the products and services we need now and in the future is the essential purpose of Asset Management. However, Asset Management is more about obtaining value from assets than what you do to the assets. It is about utilizing assets to deliver value to your organization while attaining corporate goals. Human capital is an essential element of the whole asset management process from strategy to operation.
[Read more…]How to Mitigate China’s Supply Chain Risk
Guest Post by John Ayers (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
The 21st century, was an era of unprecedented global integration. During this period, the U.S. became heavily dependent on China for providing low-cost goods to help low and medium waged Americans to make ends meet. COVID-19 unveiled a very serious weakness in the U.S. supply chain with China that was unknown to the general public and most of the legislature.
More than 85% of all imports for N-95 masks, respirators, disposable; and non-disposable face masks, surgical drapes, and surgical towels come from China. As an example, global trade in medical masks used by doctors and nurses grew from $900 million in January to $9.2 billion in May. China was the source of 92% of the U.S. imports.
How can we mitigate China’s supply chain risk? This paper presents a strategy to consider in achieving this goal.
Building Credibility: The Cornerstone of Professional Success
Credibility, often described as the currency of trust, is a quality that sets the foundation for professional success. It’s the attribute that influences how others perceive your competence, reliability, and integrity. Whether you’re an individual striving to advance your career or a business aiming to gain the trust of your clients, credibility is your guiding star. In this blog, we’ll delve into the methods of developing and enhancing credibility to help you stand out in your professional journey.
[Read more…]New Series: Principles of Effective Teaching
Principles of Effective Teaching
“I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” Albert Einstein
Reliability engineers, FMEA team leaders, and other quality and reliability professionals are often called upon to teach the principles of reliability or FMEA. This article is the beginning of a new series called “The principles of effective teaching.”
If you want to convey knowledge to another person, you are teaching. If you want to learn from another person who is teaching, you will benefit from learning these principles.
Workplace Safety Ad: Conveying The Safety Message
Here’s a touching ad from WorkSafe, an Australian safety agency, that makes us realize the importance of safety at work.
[Read more…]Getting Life Distributions from “Reliability” Handbooks? Be Careful!
The need for life distributions
Maintenance and Reliability practitioners often need to find quick methods to estimate life distributions in order to get some urgent answers to a customer. The tempting solution and easy way out to this is to refer to a handbook or publication out there. Also known as “Reliability Data” handbooks. These publications would have “ready to go” life distributions. However, this can come with multiple pitfalls listed as follows.
[Read more…]Dangers of Inventing Your Own KPIs to Measure Production Performance
A certain Operations Manager started inventing production KPIs in order to measure reliability from a production perspective. So he got together his colleagues and they came up with this formula.
Reliability = Good Production / (Net Production Hours + Nominal Speed)
When asked to define ‘good production’, I was told that it was the saleable production remaining after losses such as speed losses, first time quality, downtime, change overs, etc. were taken off.
After 3 years of running TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) across 3 factories, they made the following observations. The mean time between failure (MTBF) of equipment in all 3 factories increased. The production volumes increased. However the Reliability remained flat. How can this be? Something is not right. Is the above formula incorrect?
Is there a better way to calculate Reliability from a production perspective?
[Read more…]Introduction to the Risk Management Process
Guest Post by Peter Holtmann (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
This article is the eighth of fourteen parts to our risk management series. The series will be taking a look at the risk management guidelines under the ISO 31000 Standard to help you better understand them and how they relate to your own risk management activities. In doing so, we’ll be walking through the core aspects of the Standard and giving you practical guidance on how to implement it.
In previous articles we’ve looked at the core elements of the risk management framework, as well as the role of leadership and commitment, integration, design, implementation, evaluation and improvement more specifically. In this article, we’ll be moving away from the framework and instead introducing you to the risk management process.
Should RCM Templates be used
Maybe. Great care must be taken if any kind of template of failure mode library is used to complete an RCM analysis.
[Read more…]Pipeline Incident Data
Below is summary (annualized average) of 20-year pipeline incident data from 1990-2009. [Source: Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration,PHMSA]
[Read more…]How Does a Readability Formula Help My Business Writing?
How much should you pay attention to readability scores generated from tools like the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Formula? As a technical professional, you probably should pay careful attention. But remember, while improving the Flesch-Kincaid score is important for accessibility and readability, balancing this with accurately conveying the technical information is essential.
What’s readability?
Readability is a quality of your business writing. People will be able to understand your sentences easily if your text’s readability is high. If the readability is low, people still might understand what you’re saying, but reading your text is likely a draining experience, but people may still understand it.
Big words and complex sentences aren’t bad. Using too many of them demands much more concentration from your reader. Big words and complex sentences are also harder if someone’s first language is not yours or the reader has some form of visual or hearing impairment.
[Read more…]