Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
To be a great Maintenance Planner and Scheduler you need to know a lot about your equipment’s’ engineering, how to manage complicated projects well, use world class maintenance processes for creating equipment reliability, and a whole lot more.
Recently I was asked what skills and competencies a Maintenance Planner and Scheduler needs to master to do world class maintenance planning and scheduling.
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In 1956, Harvard Business Review published a landmark article by economist and business leader Armand Feigenbaum titled “Total Quality Control” that summarized the quality control system he developed during his long tenure at General Electric and gave prominence to many concepts still used in quality management today. One of those concepts was cost of quality measurement.
The goal of a cost of quality measurement system is to provide manufacturing leaders with a tool that can help drive process improvements. By understanding the magnitude and sources of their quality costs, manufacturing executives, managers, engineers, and technicians can more effectively direct their efforts, improvement strategies, and capital budgets toward reducing them.
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Chemical processes and designs are increasingly being evaluated for inherent safety – i.e. reduce the hazard rather than the risk. The philosophy behind inherent safety is ‘What You Don’t Have, Can’t Leak’ and so you take necessary steps to reduce the hazard.
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A common error when performing a life analysis for an asset is to confuse repairable and non-repairable assets. The mathematical determination of the life characteristics for each model is different, so throwing a simple “Weibull analysis” at them might lead to the wrong results but also the loss of valuable information.
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The tasks of a Reliability Engineer are long & diverse. While heavily dependent on the industry one is working in, it generally involves all aspects of the Equipment – from Design to Manufacturing to Operation to Maintenance. Even though the responsibility is wide, the resources available for a Reliability Engineer within an organization are limited. Often, there are only a few Reliability Engineers managing hundreds of Equipment. Given this current situation, the arrival of AI seems like a perfect resource to complement the work.
A risk is an event or activity that can go wrong and cause an impact to the project. Risks can have a negative or positive impact to the project. Risks that have a positive impact are called opportunities. If they have a negative impact, they are called risks. A goal on a project is to try and balance risks and opportunities to mitigate the chance of cost or schedule growth.
There are two basic categories of project risk. They are the known and unknown. The known risks are the four project constraints (scope, cost, schedule, quality). Poor execution of these constraints is a major reason why projects fail. This paper addresses how to manage known risks.
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Getting excellent enterprise physical asset utilization and maximum asset performance needs business-wide and life-cycle-long coordination and cooperation.
By coordinating and merging business-wide data and asset historical performance records into useful asset information, you can make timely and informed decisions that safely and profitably maximize the performance and value contribution of your enterprise physical assets
To go down the path of getting operating asset optimization it is necessary that you first identify what measures will be used to determine the “optimal asset utilization” state.
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A common step in a RCM program is to conduct a critical analysis to prioritize further analysis of those parts of the system that are critical to the operation. Yet, is criticality analysis required?
No, it is not.
Let’s explore why this may be so for your situation.
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The mental model CATER will help you recall the five ways to improve any form of team facilitation. CATER does two big things necessary for all great facilitated sessions. The mental model creates comparable knowledge among participants and opens feedback channels for successful collaboration. Apply systems thinking and improve team performance by CATERing to your participants. [Read more…]
OSHA Process Safety Management (PSM) program is nearly two decades old and I believe that the 14 PSM elements provide a good basic framework for facilities to create a safety program.
What OSHA PSM lacks is quality metric.
Let me explain further.
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Industrial operations that have operating horizons exceeding the lifespan of their assets face a crucial decision as they approach this timeline’s end (but not enough to operate the equipment until its full economically optimal life).
Specifically, they must decide whether to overhaul the asset, replace it with a new one, or rent the equipment until operations conclude. Given the numerous variables with inherent uncertainties in the financial models, how can they be confident in their decision?
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The fundamental purpose of Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability (RAM) modeling is to quantify system performance, typically in a future time interval. A system is a collection of items that operate together to produce an output, often a production value. These items can include subsystems, components, software, human operations, and more. For example, an automobile can be viewed as a system with subcomponents like the drive train, engine, gearbox, etc. In RAM models, it is crucial to consider the relationships between these items to determine the system’s final output. They have proven effective in various industries as tools for cost avoidance, decision-making, and validating assumptions made by internal stakeholders.
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If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about how new Digital technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Remote Data Sensing, and Industrial Automation apply to Reliability Engineering, then you’ve come to the right place.
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Behind all lasting business success is the ability to make business processes work successfully. Random success in business is due to luck. But lasting success relies on knowing how to use statistical process control to make your processes more successful more often.
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This article is the fourth 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 (1st, 2nd, & 3rd) we’ve looked at the core elements of the risk management framework generally, as well as the role of leadership and commitment, and integration more specifically. In this article, we’ll be looking at how to effectively design your risk management framework.
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