Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
“I really liked the pre-workshop survey,” responded an executive team member. “It enabled us to have a fast start and it helped everyone get on the same page.”
No one wants to waste their time. As the leader of any workshop or series of meetings, it is crucial to understand what is effective and what is not. A well-executed pre-session exchange is one of the most frequently cited things that make a facilitated session more efficient, more effective, and more collaborative. [Read more…]
I recently presented a webinar for SMRP and Empowering Pumps, on the title above. There were several questions, post-presentation, that I felt were worthy of expanding on in the form of a blog.
Question #1 (of a total of 5)
Do we need to categorize the RCAs (based on actual/potential impacts) to decide on the need for the depth of RCA up to Latent Roots? Are all Failures supposed to be analyzed until we reach Latent Roots?
The established tools for process plant reliability engineering are:
QUESTION: Are you truly impressed by the measurable and significant performance increase that these tools have delivered?
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“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.” – Martin Luther King
According to Merriam-Webster, a “decision” is “a choice that you make about something after thinking about it: the result of deciding.”
“Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.” – William Jennings Bryan
The Oxford English dictionary defines “reliability” as “the quality of being able to be trusted to do what somebody wants or needs.”
The textbook definition for “reliability” is “the probability that an item will perform its intended function for a designated period of time without failure under specified operating and environmental conditions.” [Read more…]
Most of the risk assessment models I’ve discussed before use a basic formula to calculate a value for risk. By adding or multiplying values for the individual factors, you’ll get a numeric value for the risk itself. That’s going to allow you to put things into order, apply a color-code or description. That gives you enough differentiation to start a risk-based discussion or determine where you need to focus your attention and resources.
[Read more…]Written by Mike Sondalini as a memo to his younger self, the content has been adapted into an article format. Given the depth of detailed information contained, this article is better considered a technical document. It summarizes Mike’s key learnings from decades of research, consulting, and training in the Plant Wellness Way EAM methodology.
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Are you ready to ramp back up?
Slowing down reduced supply and raised prices. Survival cost-cutting also put our companies into a state of Covid-induced paralysis. Like a person who is paralyzed – vital systems keep working so we survive, but growth, movement, and improvement all stop. I recall a soccer accident where my knee was damaged. I wasn’t paralyzed but that one leg was immobilized. It took me months to recover after the surgery was completed. The muscles in my leg had shrunk and strength needed to be rebuilt. In normal times, I’d have kept using the muscles and they would have strengthened, not shrunk.
In the previous articles I discussed the component design process, the considerations for designing components, and the importance of leveraging materials engineering to design components that meet performance and reliability requirements at low cost.
I will start focusing on reliability, discussing the considerations for identifying component and joint reliability requirements. I will refer only to components for ease of writing and reading, but the discussion also applies to metallurgical joints, i.e. weld, braze, and solder joints.
In this article, I will discuss identification of the conditions that can cause degradation of the materials that comprise components and joints. [Read more…]
I love yogurt and eat it every day 🥄. My favorite is Oikos Lemon Meringue 🍋. I buy it every week.
But one day, I was unpacking my grocery bags and found that I had bought banana flavored (yuck! 🥺) instead of Lemon Meringue.
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Step 1: Know your role and your responsibilities
The first step in creating more self-accountability is to start by making an assessment of what your role is and what those specific responsibilities are.
If you’re a father, your role and responsibilities are very different than if you’re the head of an emergency room, or if you’re coach of a basketball team. Every area of your life can have different roles, but the responsibilities of being a father, for example, can impact the responsibilities of being an entrepreneur. You will need to think about how late nights in the office can affect missing Timmy’s baseball game into your plan.
[Read more…]No discussion about managerial skills would be complete without talking about time management. Effective managers are excellent at utilizing their time. More than just their time, successful managers proficiently steward the range resources under their control … the people, the equipment, and the finances. But time is the most valuable of them all.
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Reliability-based forecasts can be made from field data on complaints, failures, repairs, age-replacements (life limits), NTFs (no trouble found), WEAP (warranty expiration anticipation phenomenon), spares, warranty claims, or deaths. Some spares inventory forecasting software says… “Please enter forecast______” No kidding. 1800 years ago Roman Jurist Ulpian made actuarial pension cost forecasts for retiring Roman Legionnaires. Would you like actuarial forecasts? Their distributions? Stock recommendations?
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Citizens often oppose chemical process facilities near their community because of potential for high consequence events. This risk aversion of society is commonly referred to as NIMBY (Not-in-my-backyard). The risk aversion is based not by taking into account annual fatalities but based on potential worst-case catastrophe. Thus the main factor influencing risk perception is catastrophic consequence potential.
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Much has been written about James Reason’s original Swiss Cheese Model described in his book Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents. Figure 1 is a basic representation of this model. Many today consider this model to be obsolete because of the evolving complexity of systems due to emerging technologies. Therefore, the linearity of failure expressed in this original model, is not as applicable as it was when introduced.
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