Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Every organization and organism’s performance is limited to the capability of its design. If you want better business results, then get or build a new organization with systems designed to naturally deliver the outcomes and profits you want. Nothing else you do will ever work as well!
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Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is becoming an important topic and activity worldwide. This is in part because of COVID 19. COVID 19 focused the public’s attention on health risks. As the world comes out of the pandemic crisis, the focus, particularly in government, will be on other risks. Already, in the United States, cities which defunded the police, are reallocating money back due to rising crime. However, because of the political atmosphere and retirement of senior officers, cities are having trouble recruiting enough people to fill the vacated ranks. Adding to this problem are the consequences of riots and work from home. In many urban areas, the result has been a hollowing out of the urban core.
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Reliability engineering and quality engineering are closely related disciplines that both focus on ensuring that products, processes, and systems are efficient, effective, and meet the required standards. As such, there are several ways in which reliability engineers can improve their skills by learning about quality engineering.
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Preservation and repair are as old as sailing, but a written record of how this was managed has not always survived. One failure mechanism that has affected wooden vessels for centuries is shipworm – a mollusc that drills deep holes into the hull.
Shipworm was common in the Mediterranean, so there is a long record of means to combat it. A shipwreck in Kyrenia has been dated to somewhere between 384 BC – 288 BC. The hull was covered with hammered lead sheathing to protect it from shipworm. Archaeological examination concluded that over its lifetime, the ship had received four major repairs, and in-service modification. The Kyrenia ship first sailed with no sheathing, but wooden sheathing was added. Later, lead sheathing was used. (Steffy p. 95) Archeologists have also observed the use of oche on ship hulls in the Mediterranean and debate if the purpose was preservation of the hull. Several Greek and Roman ships with lead sheathing have been studied. By 1514, Spain was using lead sheathing. An Englishman who had served the Spanish crown sheathed a small English squadron with lead sheathing in 1553. (Wilkinson p. 132) In 1624, Monson wrote in Monson’s Tracts that the Spanish and Portuguese used lead sheathing, but that it was “not durable” so not in use in England.
The major cause of natural gas pipeline rupture is not corrosion or material defect but external damage.
External damage is the damage to pipeline during digging, pilling, ground work, etc. by heavy equipment such as anchor, bulldozer, excavator, or plough. Moreover typically the external damage is from third party construction activities and not the pipeline owner-operator.
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Reliability and systems engineers are in it for the long game. Their work feeds big decisions that take months or years to evaluate and must pass through many levels of management. Big decisions are filled with complexity (many interrelated parts) and uncertainty (unknown beyond doubt or not clearly defined). This article provides several key observations about uncertainty and five tips on how to drive out uncertainty with FINESSE.
Uncertainty refers to situations involving imperfect or unknown information. It applies to predictions of future events, to physical measurements that are already made, or to the unknown. Uncertainty arises in partially observable environments and is due to ignorance, indolence, or both (Norvig and Thrun).
Technical professionals drive toward collecting more data – more knowledge – but is that really what decision-makers care about?
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There are only two ways to get high system reliability if you want a highly reliable system. Equipment in an operation can be configured in series or in parallel. In series, one item connects sequentially to the other. In parallel, each item is arranged as a companion, where one duplicates the other.
A series arrangement needs exceptionally reliable individual equipment to get a highly reliable system. A parallel arrangement can form a highly reliable system even if individual equipment has poor reliability.
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We are in an interesting time in history, when transformative digital disruptions have their foot on the gas and are accelerating at exponential rates. Every industry is facing disruption in a multitude of ways, and it is now up to business leaders and their organizations to implement my Anticipatory Organization® Model and understand and identify the future certainties of Hard Trends and how to leverage them to become the disruptor before someone else does.
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When working with a team creating a new system, I always ask, “what is the goal?” The answers often do not make much sense. The team using SMART reliability goals are astonishingly well-stated.
The difference that makes a goal, objective, or requirement practical and useful is summed up by SMART. A SMART goal is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Let’s explore each element as related to a reliability goal.
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According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), there were 11 deaths every 100,000 workers in India in 2005. This number was two in the US and 0.01 in Japan. What is scary is that the number of fatalities may be significantly underestimated because of absence of a formal accident tracking system. I suspect the situation in other developing nations isn’t significantly different.
Why is the fatality rate in the industrial sectors in the developing nations so high?
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While I’m not much of a New Year’s Resolution guy, I guess I’ve set a resolution. I need to restart writing weekly articles for Accendo Reliability.
The thing is, I struggle to write. Plenty of other interests and tasks keep me away from the keyboard. Yet, as I explained to a few new authors how writing and posting on Accendo Reliability is a good thing, I realized I have been putting off hitting the keyboard again.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve explained to those interested in writing articles about the virtuous circle created by having many authors contribute articles, which increases interest, engagement, and traffic to those articles, which further increases the reach of those articles. Of course, this is just one reason, and there are others, plus plenty of hurdles to overcome.
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Guest post by Kenneth Latino.
I have been in the business of maintenance and reliability for nearly 35 years. I have had the luxury of working with many industries during my career both as a practitioner in a large paper mill and as a maintenance/reliability consultant. I have been able to see what works and what does not. So, these are some of the mistakes I have made personally and have also seen others make. It is by far not a comprehensive list but does provide some of the more important reasons and some potential solutions.
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In 1999 I left a 19-year career at Eastman Kodak to start my own Manufacturing Reliability Consulting Company. Looking back 23 years I really had no idea what I was getting into, but I was confident that I had something to offer companies that other consultants didn’t.
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Technical professionals are often asked to “lead” teams through the application of assessment tools such as failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), Root Cause Analysis (RCM), and Reliability Block Diagrams. In some cases, you may be a department manager. In other cases, you are the subject matter expert. Sometimes senior management simply knows you are willing to do it.
The issue is not whether you are smart enough or the most personable engineer in the group. The problem is that you may have all the hard skills required to do the assessment, but you lack formal training in the soft skills. Most of us do the best we can.
This article provides some insights for doing better rather than just being adequate.
