Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Let’s dispel five common myths about reliability centered maintenance, including:
Think back to the restaurant mess we talked about a few pages back, who was responsible?
The lesson for grown-ups (and more importantly executives and business leaders) from The Boy Who Cried Wolf is that the boy was at fault when he lied the first time, but the person who was really responsible for the sheep being lost was the shepherd who left his flock with a boy who he knew couldn’t be trusted.
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I noticed that API-14C recommends monitoring of 2-ppm (and higher) SO2 levels. I felt this was a really low threshold value for SO2 .
What surprised me further is that the Immediately Dangerous to Life or Health (IDLH) value for SO2 is 100-ppm…same as H2S!
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Many people often ask, “how do I know if I have the proper annual maintenance spend for my plant?”. This short video will provide some concrete answers to measure how your maintenance spend compares to best practices.
This short video covers a simple formula to help you determine if your annual maintenance spend if reasonable.
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All decisions require an allocation of resources. In the case of environmental decisions, the way we spend our time, money, or behaviors changes the quality of life and the people around us. In addition to two precursors, there are seven reasons environmental decisions are difficult. Approaching the many parts of environmental decision making as a system produces five ways we can allocate resources in an effective manner. [Read more…]
The Instantaneous Cost and Failure from Breakdowns is Huge. When a failure incident occurs, there is a consequential loss of profits and amassing of costs. The cost of failure includes lost profit, the cost of repair, fixed and variable operating costs wasted during the downtime, and a myriad of consequential costs that surge through the business. They are all paid for by the organisation and seen as poor financial performance. The costs of failure cannot be escaped and are counted in fortunes of lost profit per year. Total defect and failure true costs are not normally recognised by managers, yet they can send businesses bankrupt. In the instance of a failure, all its costs and losses are automatically incurred on the business. These costs can only be prevented by not having the failure in the first place. This article explains the ‘Instantaneous Cost of Failure’ (ICOF) and introduces a proactive technique, ‘Defect and Failure True Costing’, that helps companies recognise and prevent this tremendous waste of money.
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This story is an example of centering your design around a high-tech solution to a problem when a low risk proven technology would have more than sufficed. Technical expertise egos got in the way of a practical low-cost approach resulting in unplanned schedule and cost growth.
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Someone asked, “…if you can give me quick explanation: For Example, EPRD 2014 part, Category: IC, Subcategory: Digital, Subtype1: JK, Failure Rate (FPMH) = 0.083632 per (million) calendar hours! How do you convert that to operational hours?” I.e., time-to-failure T has exponential distribution in calendar (million) hours with MTBF 11.9571 (million) hours.
Did the questioner mean how to convert calendar-hour MTBF into operating-hour MTBF? David Nichols’ article does that for 217Plus MTBF predictions, based on “the percentage of calendar time that the component is in the operating or non-operating (dormant) calendar period, and how many times the component is cycled during that period.” I.e., MTBF/R where R is the proportion of operating hours per calendar hour.
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| Oxygen Concentration (% Volume) | Symptoms of acute exposure |
|---|---|
| 15-19 | May impair coordination. Decreased ability to perform tasks |
| 12-15 | Impaired coordination, perception, and judgment |
| 10-12 | Increased breathing rate, poor coordination and judgment, lips slightly blue |
| 8-10 | Mental failure, fainting, unconsciousness, ashen face, blueness of lips, nausea, upset stomach and vomiting |
| 6-8 | 8 minute exposure: may be fatal in 50-100%; 6 minute exposure: may be fatal in 25-50%; 4-5 minutes exposure: Recovery with treatment |
| 4-6 | Coma in 40-seconds, followed by convulsions, breathing failure, death |
Source: Compressed Natural Gas Safety Bulletin, SB-2, 1992.
I recently sat down with Ray Moore and chatted about my new book, Facilitating with FINESSE: How to Lead Others to Successful Business Solutions. The book is scheduled for release on May 31, 2023.
Ray: What is your new book about?
JD: It is a practitioner’s guide for 10 common applications that technically trained professionals are frequently asked to facilitate. The range of applications covers quality and reliability techniques such as block diagrams and tree diagrams through master plans and strategic plans.
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This is the sixth edition of the R for Engineering newsletter, and today we look at the ultimate prioritization tool – Pareto charts!
Pareto charts are a core tool for anyone who makes decisions, whether it is selecting a project or problem to solve, combing through last year’s spend or deciding on what equipment to purchase this year. The list goes on; bottom line is that Pareto charts simply allow you to focus on what’s important and cut through what may be interesting but unimportant.
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Guest Post by Howard M. Wiener (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
I am pretty close to completing my first book – Agile Enterprise Risk Management, Risk-Based Thinking, Multi-Disciplinary Management and Digital Transformation. It is now at the publishers, awaiting finalization. I have established a site for the book and this is the home page text that describes what AERM is all about.
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Read about the Requirements for the Content of the ISO 9001 Quality Manual Lead Document from which the rest of an ISO 9001 Quality System Cascades
An ISO 9001 Quality Management System requires a ISO 9001 Quality Manual that contains all the details of how your business is run to produce your products or services to a quality standard.
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CBM or Condition-Based Maintenance is a maintenance approach that includes these five facts:
A good mental framework to have is that instead of you pushing towards accomplishing goals, you think about what things you have to “pull” to get to the end game. The subtle shift in the thinking will position you to find more creative solutions to problems. A very frequent problem with management who doesn’t really know how to solve problems is saying things like “work harder”. If we just turn up the Hard Work Dial to 11, then the problems will go away, obviously. Instead if we looked at what is stopping the success and actively worked on removing those problems, we’d be able to remove the stress of failure without having to break the Hard Work Dial.
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