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How I Stumbled Upon R

How I Stumbled Upon R

It all started two years ago. I had been in engineering, mostly in quality engineering, all my career, and at that point decided I would try and expand my analytical capabilities as an engineer. Not that I didn’t already have tools at my fingertips; I would use Excel, a lot. I was actually pretty good at it, having developed even custom applications with macros and all the bells and whistles. I had Minitab, which most engineers in my line of work also use. If it’s not Mintiab, then it is JMP or one of those statistical applications. They’re all fine.

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The Connection Between Equipment Risk and Equipment Reliability

The Connection Between Equipment Risk and Equipment Reliability

A slide deck of a presentation made by Mike at the SIRFRt WA Maintenance Roundtable November 2011.

Mike goes into depth with risk quantification, plotting techniques, along with connecting maintenance related risk to business risk levels. The presentation also explores using reliability as an element in the risk equation and discusses a few different ways to minimize risks.

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Project Leadership: Action or Damnation

Project Leadership: Action or Damnation

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

“You’ll be damned if you do and damned if you don’t”.  This was the message from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for those situations when you believe in your heart that you are doing the right thing even if, or when others believe it to be wrong.  This is what leaders do, they lead based upon what they believe to be right and will reap the consequences, whatever the outcome.  Leadership is about doing; it’s about making things happen through the people who follow and enabling those people to make it happen.  It’s also about being responsible for your actions and those of the others who have acted on your behalf.

Leadership has always been around in some form or another; there is always a leader of any pack or tribe.  Successful leaders and their idiosyncratic styles are not only analysed and biographed but also emulated and even imitated.  Practically speaking though it boils down to the ability of some to influence, motivate and direct teams of individuals to undertake some task or other.  The traits of leadership in turn are a function of a leader’s character and the situations in which they find themselves, the people around them, and the task at hand.

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Self-Discipline Part 2

Self-Discipline Part 2

Self-discipline can be broken into two portions: the will to get the actions turned into habits, and the ability to create incentives to keep the habits going, long after passion fades away.

The first thing we need to do is set some clear goals, which you can take from the personal development plan we created earlier. Next we’re going to look at the time audit we did where we broke everything into ten minute sections. We’re going to act like project managers for our days, and we’re going to micro-manage our time (to start) to make sure that our time we plan on investing in our goals is actually implemented.

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What Are Best Practices for Facilitating Qualitative Assessments?

What Are Best Practices for Facilitating Qualitative Assessments?

Opinion-based data is the foundation of qualitative assessments. Qualitative assessments are used in various applications, including asset management, risk management, human reliability analysis, and customer surveys. The usefulness of any qualitative assessment is a function of design, analysis, and administration. The article provides best practices for improving administering and facilitating qualitative assessments.

A Long History with Many Forms

The modern basis of opinion-based data’s scientific use can be traced from the western hemisphere to the late 1800s. Educators and psychologists were seeking to quantify their clinical observations of human behavior. A similar movement was underway in the fields of natural science and statistics.

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So, What’s Still Wrong with Maintenance

So, What’s Still Wrong with Maintenance

Enterprise Asset Management and Maintenance will Always be Spectacularly Unsuccessful at Delivering Failure-Free Equipment, Until you Change to an Equipment Wellness Paradigm

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The role of Maintenance is to eliminate operating equipment risks. Yet, organizations using Preventive and Predictive Maintenance strategies still have equipment breakdowns. They still have forced outages and stoppages. They consistently get emergency repairs. So, what makes today’s Maintenance paradigm so unsuccessful at equipment risk elimination? Because it is the wrong paradigm to use. The right mindset to have is an equipment wellness paradigm!

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Foundation of Great Project Outcomes – Structures

Foundation of Great Project Outcomes – Structures

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

Structures are all around us, even chaos has structure albeit fractal.  We humans too involved in structures; not only do we construct physical structures, but we form organisational structures and create civilizations using the social, economic and cultural structures that rule our lives.

Some of these structures collapse due to human error, natural forces outside of our control, and man’s destructive and violent nature.  The reasons for such collapses may not be understood but, being inquisitive we strive to find out.  But these endeavours are not only earthbound as we also seek to work out the structure of the universe and its workings.  An early example of such work is from the astronomer Kepler who developed his model of our solar system.  Although geometrically fascinating it’s a far cry from our modern-day perceptions

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Covariance of the Kaplan-Meier Estimators?

Covariance of the Kaplan-Meier Estimators?

What are the covariances of Kaplan-Meier reliability estimates at different ages? I need them for the variance of actuarial demand forecasts and for confidence bands on reliability. I thought cohort reliability estimate variances and covariances in the previous article were a good idea. How good? Not as good as bootstrap and jackknife resampling alternatives!

The Kaplan-Meier reliability function estimator uses right-censored and grouped time-to-failure counts in periodic cohorts (rows in table 1). The Nelson-Aalen cumulative failure rate function estimators are theoretically independent [Aalen, Nelson], but not for some examples. The Kaplan-Meier reliability and actuarial failure rate function estimates at different ages are dependent, so their covariances matter to actuarial forecasts and confidence bands on reliability.

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Use Of RFID In Process Safety: Track Hazardous Chemicals And Track Personnel

Use Of RFID In Process Safety: Track Hazardous Chemicals And Track Personnel

RFID stands for Radio-Frequency IDentification. It is a small electronic device that consist of a chip (capable of carrying 2000 bytes of data) and an antenna.

A RFID device provides a unique identifier and serves the same purpose as a bar code on a consumer product or a magnetic strip on the back of a credit card.

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How to Reduce Maintenance Cost The Right Way

How to Reduce Maintenance Cost The Right Way

How to reduce maintenance cost the right way comes up a lot for our clients. Unfortunately, many organizations often have the goal of reducing maintenance cost. While the maintenance cost is an important long-term outcome of maintenance management, it should not be the main goal. If the reduction of maintenance cost is the main goal for maintenance, the organization is on the wrong track and will eventually fail.

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Significance Over Success. Innovation Over Change. Anticipation Over Agility

Significance Over Success. Innovation Over Change. Anticipation Over Agility

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

Question for all who read this: to succeed at any business venture, you merely need to have huge resources, dedicated personnel, and a quality product or service, right? From there, it’s just collecting money and living a good life.

This presumption is more common than you realize, and could not be more wrong and misguided. In a world where exponential change and digital disruptions abound, you simply cannot rest on your laurels and merely rely on what you’ve already built. Because of the rapidly accelerating rate of change, your business is only ever as strong as its next innovation.

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Maintenance Planning and Scheduling for World Class Reliability and Maintenance Performance

Maintenance Planning and Scheduling for World Class Reliability and Maintenance Performance

3-Day Training Course

Day 3 Maintenance Planning and Maintenance Scheduling Slides with Complete Explanations

Welcome to the final day of the Maintenance Planning and Scheduling for World Class Reliability and Maintenance Performance 3-Day Training Course. I hope that you enjoyed Days 1 and 2 and found the maintenance, reliability, work quality control and work planning concepts they contained useful.

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