Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
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 #2 (of a total of 5)
How do you manage a situation where people just decide not to use simple tools like RCFA, just comfortable doing things same way? Even when you keep driving it.
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I knew it was going to be a long week when my co-facilitator asked the group, “So, what happens when a submersible pump fails.” Their eyes spoke louder than the deafening silence. The skinny guy on the front row responded, “Don’t YOU know?” “You are an idiot!” exclaimed the old guy on the left side with a deep stare. The slightly heavy woman in the middle, who looked like everyone’s big sister, retorted, “why don’t you just tell us.” The fat guy in the back looked around, cut his eyes back at me, and said, “Where are the doughnuts?”
Yup, it was going to be a long week. Facilitating Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is never fun. Tag teaming the facilitation usually helps everyone stay fresh. But as Forrest Gump said about the box of chocolates, when you co-facilitate in a Fortune 500 company you never know what you are going to get.
Powerful questions are enablers of better facilitation. Using powerful questions takes awareness, discipline, practice, and self-appraisal. Facilitators need powerful questions to get better participant answers and create better results.
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Covid put many of our companies into a paralysis-like state. We’ve survived thanks to austerity measures, but we all know that we can’t cut our way to prosperity. As the recovery looms, we can act now to ensure sustained operational efficiency and organic growth post-pandemic.
Improving your maintenance program, as mundane as it may sound, can produce very high returns for very little investment. The first step – stop viewing maintenance as a cost to be minimized. Rather, view it as an ongoing investment in productive capacity.
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“Puttin’ wood in t’ole after ‘oss ‘as bolted“… this is actually English, it really is, and it’s a Yorkshire phrase meaning ‘shutting the gate after the horse has gone’.
How often are we wise after the fact? How often is more time and effort spent focusing on the gate rather than retrieving the horse? There is a tendency to try and find the person responsible for not closing the gate, requiring more people to check on gate closing, writing procedures for closing the gate and this is coupled with hours of pointless and misdirected discussions by every man along with their barking dogs. But what about catching the horse that now runs free and ensuring it can’t bolt again?
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The cyclo-drive gearbox is a variation of a planetary gearbox. They have the added advantage of not using gear teeth to drive the shafts; rather they use an internal offset cam arrangement to drive rolling pins that turn a cycloidal wheel inside the gearbox. The rollers are capable of taking 500% overload without breaking the gearbox. One other benefit of the cyclo-drive gearbox for users is that many models are grease filled and do not use oil.
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Sometimes we find inspiration in the most unlikely places! Join me for this impromptu LIVE as I share three important lessons about Productivity, Reliability, and Life.
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A great tool to help diagnose where these problems come into play is using the four quadrants from Stephen Covey’s great book, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” or sometimes called “The Eisenhower Matrix” after the famous General and President.
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It is estimated that there are more than 500,000 Above ground storage tanks (ASTs) in the U.S. These tanks can leak gradually (more likely) or may collapse suddenly (low probability). The loss of tank content can lead to water contamination or may lead to a fire in case of a hydrocarbon.
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“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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