Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
When planning and scheduling, we need to have estimated hours to be able to schedule efficiently. Without estimated hours it makes it close to impossible to know your resource consumption. To take your scheduling efforts to the next level you need to understand the difference between Duration of job vs. labor hours required to perform the tasks.
Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are a part of today’s corporate growth strategy. As a part of M&A due diligence various critical business issues are evaluated. But what about safety performance of the company you are looking to acquire or merge with?
You will say that most M&A in oil and gas/chemical processing industries are asset-driven. You look at what the pots and pans can do for you in the future and base your M&A decision.
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“His Majesty Will Have A Fleet Upon The Durability Of Which There May Be Some Dependence.”
In 1763, the Seven Years’ War ended and the Royal Navy demobilized. The Earl of Sandwich left the office of the First Lord of the Admiralty for the second time. At the end of the war, Britain had 149 ships of the line. Scrapping, retirement, and storage reduced the fleet size and maintenance requirements. The navy was trying to manage a shrinking fleet with a shrinking budget.
In 1763, the Admiralty requested a report of the total value of all ships and their stores, and an analysis of the “annual cost of replacing them in cycles between twelve and sixteen years,” according to historian N. A. M. Rodger. The Admiralty also asked for an estimate for annual repair and maintenance at task work rates if they expanded the number of shipwrights to 3000. (Shipwrights were the carpenters in dockyards who built and repaired ships.)
By 1765, only 47 of the 140 ships were in good condition. The Navy Board made a plan to increase the number of ships in good condition to from 47 to 63, but the plan required three years and an extra £2,000,000. Once restored to good condition, the plan assumed that the existing shipwright workforce could maintain a fleet of 90 ships. This approach would only work if the shipwrights were allowed to maximize overtime all summer, for every summer to come…the workforce and labor budget were at maximum capacity. To actually maintain 140 ships in good condition, the shipwright workforce would have to be expanded from 3,150 to 4,200. The government did not want to expand its civilian industrial labor base at a time when it expected a peace dividend.
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The fundamental purpose of Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability (RAM) modeling is quantifying system performance, typically in a future interval of time. A system is a collection of items whose coordinated operation leads to the output, generally a production value. The collection of items includes subsystems, components, software, human operations, etc. For example, an automobile can be considered as a system with sub-components being the drivetrain, engine, gearbox, etc. In RAM models, it is crucial to account for relationships between items to determine the final output of the system. In various industries, RAM models have proven to be effective as cost avoidance or decision-making tools, as well as their ability to confirm or counter stated assumptions by internal stakeholders.
This paper highlights a non-exhaustive list of seven diverse solutions that a RAM model can bring to the organization in terms of decision-making advantages.
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Asset reliability assessment when buying running and used operating plant and equipment. Aging asset reliability assessment can be done quantitatively if all past component stresses are know, or it is down qualitatively when only operating and maintenance history is available.
I am a developing reliability professional and often read your articles. I was wondering if you could give me a bit of advice about the subject of aging asset reliability assessment for operating assets?
Can you please share your thoughts on reliability assessment for a thermal power plant, and its importance in acquisition of a running ageing plant. Is it a common practice to look at this aspect prior to acquisition and is it practical? And if so, how do we go about it?
Thank you for your advice.
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This article is the third 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 our previous articles (1st, 2nd) we introduced you to the core elements of the risk management framework. This included integration, design, implementation, evaluation, improvement, and the role of leadership and commitment.
In this article, we’ll be looking at integrating and adapting the risk management framework to your organisation. In particular, we’ll be focusing on how you can best understand your organization’s structures and context, appreciate the role of governance and strategy, appreciate risk management accountability, and the importance of being iterative and dynamic with your approach to integration.
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This mindset I have and bring to my client’s struggling businesses did not get built overnight. It took years of conscious concentration to develop the discipline that says basically, if something goes wrong, it was probably my fault. Either I didn’t plan or predict a problem, or I didn’t solve the problem before it happened a second time; but now the burden is on me to solve it.
Luckily I have a few tips on how to develop a self-ownership mindset.
The third step in the RCM process is to identiy failure modes. When a failure mode occurs it leads to a functional failure.
Identifying failure modes correctly and clearly is vital to the RCM process because we manage physical assets at the failure mode level.
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Natural gas pipelines have caused incidents leading to fatalities, injuries, and property damages.
To be precise, there have been an average of 50 serious gas pipeline incidents every year in the U.S. between 1990-2009 (Source: http://primis.phmsa.dot.gov/comm/reports/safety/SerPSI.html?nocache=4823) resulting in more than 300 fatalities. Majority of the reported gas incidents have occurred on the gas distribution lines – i.e. gas pipeline systems that are found in thousands of communities from coast to coast and distribute natural gas to our homes and businesses.
Asset management in the mining industry is an intricate dance of financial and operational factors. It demands a firm understanding of complex financial concepts to make strategic decisions effectively, one of which is the discount rate. This number, far from being just an abstract figure, can fundamentally shape a business’s strategic path, particularly concerning asset replacement.
The discount rate is essentially the interest rate used to calculate the present value of future cash flows. The concept comes into play when considering an asset replacement. This decision involves weighing costs and benefits over a time horizon that often spans several years. The discount rate serves as the conduit that translates these future values into present terms, enabling apples-to-apples comparisons. Most of use use this in NPV calculations where we evaluate business improvement initiatives, and compare the viability and return of various projects.
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How well should a maintenance job be planned ? All maintenance work needs a plan that lets the maintainer do the work correctly, safely, in the least possible time and for the least cost. Selecting the information and details that go into the maintenance job plan is vital to its success. Leave out necessary specifics and facts and you put the job at increased risk of failure, loss and waste. Exactly what details are necessary to allow maintenance work to flow wonderfully well at minimal cost and time are important for a maintenance planner and their managers to know.
[Read more…]This article is the second 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 this particular article, we’ll be highlighting the role and importance of leadership and commitment to supporting robust risk management practices. We’ll also be looking at the benefits of such support together with some practical tips for doing so.
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What is the difference between FMEA and FMECA? Are they the same or different? The answer may surprise you. Let’s explore this topic.
Jack-Knife Diagrams, also known as Log-Scatter Plots, serve as an invaluable visual tool in the realm of Reliability Engineering for prioritizing areas of downtime that require improvement. While many engineers rely on Pareto Charts, we will explore the shortcomings of this approach and how the Jack-Knife Diagram overcomes them.
Now, let’s delve into the distinction between the two methods.
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Risk is a perception.
Our perception of risks is mainly affected by two factors:
(a) whether we are voluntarily accepting the risk.
A good example is a refinery worker considers the risks at workplace lower than his cousin who has only read about chemical plants; and
(b) potential consequences of event or act or decision.
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