Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
In the automotive industry, safety is paramount. Yet, even giants like Ford Motor Company can stumble when it comes to addressing critical safety concerns. The recent saga of Ford’s brake system issues serves as a stark reminder of the importance of corporate responsibility and the potential consequences of overlooking serious defects.
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WIIFT is “what’s in it for them”. Similar to what’s in it for me, yet the focus is your consideration of what value are you providing your audience.
As a reliability engineer you collection, analyze and report reliability measures. You report reliability estimates or results. Do you know how your audience is going to use this information?
Consider WIIFT when reporting reliability. [Read more…]
We hear about data driven decisions and it’s become somewhat of a mantra for IT departments, managers and even executives. But they’ve got it wrong! Data shouldn’t drive anything – it can’t. But it can be a powerful enabler if we want. A subtle shift in language can lead to big gains in performance!
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The total cost of downtime extends across the business. In the worst cases, it impacts the entire organisation and customers.
From the moment of failure to the restart of production, no saleable product is made. Instead, money is spent on repairs, with continued fixed costs, and any potential profits that could have been made from saleable products is lost. The graph below illustrates what happens to production time and costs when operations stop due to equipment breakdown (t1). The time and costs required to repair the equipment to operational levels (t2) is unknown at the start of the breakdown.
During this time (t1 to t2) resources and money are needed to return the equipment to operation. Additional costs due to loss of production and therefore potential profit losses are also incurred in this time.
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I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful.
Elon Musk – Entrepreneur
Artificial intelligence (AI) and robots conjure images of killer robots like the Terminator movie.
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In this video, filmed at the historic La Popa Monastery in Cartagena, Colombia, I dive into the importance of Failure Effects in the Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) process. Failure Effects might seem like just one step in the RCM journey, but they’re essential for understanding the impact of Failure Modes — and that’s what makes them so special.
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In today’s fast-paced industrial and manufacturing environments, maintenance teams are under constant pressure to keep assets running efficiently while minimizing downtime and controlling costs. A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) has become an essential tool for achieving these goals. More than just a digital record-keeping system, a CMMS provides a structured and data-driven approach to asset management, work order tracking, preventive maintenance scheduling, and overall maintenance optimization.
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When people hear the word reliability, it’s often interpreted as meaning “zero failures”. While that’s understandable, it’s not what reliability engineering is really about.
The Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE) Body of Knowledge, produced by the American Society for Quality, defines reliability as:
“The probability that an item will perform a required function without failure under stated conditions for a specified period of time”
Crucially, each part of this definition needs to be clearly understood and agreed from the outset, particularly between customers and suppliers. Many reliability problems arise not because the definition itself is wrong, but because these elements are interpreted differently.
[Read more…]None of us is a smart as all of us. – Ken Blanchard
FMEAs have great potential value to improve product designs and manufacturing processes. That value increases significantly when FMEA is properly linked and connected to other analyses.
1. Design FMEA can be linked to Process FMEA.
How long will an asset last? It sounds straightforward, but anyone who has spent time in infrastructure planning knows it’s one of the most deceptively complex questions we face. Reliability engineers, accountants, and operations leaders may use the same terms for asset life, yet they’re often talking about entirely different things—different assumptions, different incentives, different definitions of “truth.”
When those perspectives stay siloed, organizations make decisions that look defensible on paper but fall apart in practice. When we reconcile them, we create clarity, strengthen our systems, and make investment choices that actually hold up in the real world. Understanding asset life is truly about complexity and systems thinking.
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The tragic crashes of the Boeing 737 Max serve as a stark reminder of the critical role reliability plays in engineering design and practice. These incidents, which occurred in October 2018 and March 2019, resulted in the loss of 346 lives and sent shockwaves through the aviation industry. The crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were not mere accidents but the culmination of a series of engineering oversights, management decisions, and regulatory failures.
At the heart of these tragedies was a complex interplay of advanced technology and human factors. The Boeing 737 Max, designed to be more fuel-efficient than its predecessors, incorporated a new flight control system that would ultimately prove to be its Achilles’ heel. This system, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), was intended to compensate for the aerodynamic changes resulting from the aircraft’s larger, more fuel-efficient engines. However, the MCAS relied heavily on data from a single sensor, creating a single point of failure that would have catastrophic consequences.
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This article is adapted from Chapter 3 of my book titled Measuring Manufacturing Effectiveness.
The book is organized as a structured, multi-chapter exploration of how manufacturing organizations define, measure, and interpret “effectiveness.” Rather than focusing on isolated metrics or tools, it examines measurement as a system; one that shapes decisions, priorities, and behavior across operations, quality, reliability, and management.
Each chapter is written to stand on its own, while also contributing to a larger, integrated framework for understanding manufacturing performance.
Chapter 3 focuses on three of the most commonly used, and most frequently misunderstood, manufacturing effectiveness metrics:
Although these measures are often treated as variations of the same idea, they differ in important and meaningful ways. This chapter clarifies what each metric is designed to measure, the assumptions embedded in each definition, and the types of questions each metric is and is not capable of answering.
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Where do you look when hiring a new reliability engineer? Do you head to U of Maryland or other university reliability program to recruit the top talent? Or, do you promote/assign from within? Where do yo find the best reliability people? [Read more…]
With thousands of opportunities to make human errors and mistakes in a job an ACE 3T standard operating procedure is a powerful way to get work done right-first-time. When the situational risk from errors is too high a Plant Wellness Way EAM System-of-Reliability uses ACE 3T SOPs to ensure work tasks and activities are correct and error-free.
We’re all human, and humans make mistakes—lots of them every day. The image below warns that 10 to 30 errors per 100 opportunities is typical for trained people not using a standard operating procedure. Mistakes happen to all of us. The more complicated the job and the more stressful the situation the higher is the human error rate. A PWW EAM System-of-Reliability protects against human error by giving people an ACE 3T standard operating procedure to follow and be 100% successful.
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If you are running a business today, you probably incorporate digital elements in your products and services. At the very least, you employ digital technology in the operation of your business. It’s likely that you have adopted an Agile framework and possibly even DevOps processes. It’s also likely that you are not getting the productivity boost from it that you should.
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