Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Tune in for a panel discussion recorded at the 2025 Sustainable Manufacturing Expo in Anaheim California featuring panelists Corey Dickens (Brightly) and Jim Mayer (The Manufacturing Connector) talking maintenance, maintenance management, CMMS, leadership, and change management in sustainable manufacturing!
Complex systems, such as automobiles, contain many moving parts that can lead to failure from a variety of causes and failure modes. AI can utilize system data recorded over time to automatically alert us to imminent failure and identify root causes.
Decision Trees are a relatively simple and popular AI tool, that can quickly learn and assess key variables and their interactions which contribute to an outcome such as system failure. They are fast to create, easy to interpret and can help us identify failure modes.
In this webinar, we will look at the basics of decision tree modelling and consider a simple demonstration of its application to assess imminent failure in automobiles. [Read more…]
You’ve been there. You walk into a design review, a planning session, or a phase gate meeting. You’re ready to contribute, to challenge, to solve. But within minutes, you realize: the decision was already made. The room is a stage, the discussion a script, and you’re just an audience member.
This isn’t just frustrating. It’s a sign of a deeper systemic issue.
In this episode, Dianna shares a powerful personal story from attending a state-level congressional hearing that mirrored the exact same dynamic she’s seen in product development: a performance, not a process. She reveals why these “formal” meetings often fail, not because of bad people, but because of broken incentives and poor timing.
The real solution? Influence doesn’t happen in the meeting. It happens before it. By shifting your focus to early, intentional conversations with cross-functional teams, you can stop being a witness and start shaping the outcome. This isn’t about being louder. It’s about being earlier for upstream influence in product development.
Learn how to build credibility, surface risks, and align on problems before solutions are locked in. The result? Less rework, better decisions, and teams that actually move forward together.
Recorded Live from the Streamline Asset Management User Conference in Greenville, SC! his CMMSradio Panel Discussion features Trent McJunkin, John Lindmann, and Zach Salvato talking maintenance management, CMMS, EAM, asset management, asset performance management, and more! What matters to your team, various aspects of change management, and where the impacts show up when this is done properly – we cover all of it!!
Artificial intelligence is being promoted as the next revolution in electronics manufacturing, but what happens when the people evaluating it aren’t traditional AI experts, aren’t software vendors, and aren’t selling anything?
Today’s conversation brings together engineers and professors who live at the intersection of education, reliability, and real-world manufacturing to separate meaningful progress from speculation.
Each episode brings together engineers, researchers, and industry leaders to examine best practices, emerging technologies, and real-world lessons, always with a focus on data, physics, Best practices, and long-term performance.
Today’s episode is a little different—and the setting couldn’t be better. I’m recording live from the Big Island of Hawaii, in Kona, at the SMTA Pan Pacific Strategic Electronics Symposium, better known as PanPac.
At PanPac, academia meets industry in a way that’s truly unique. Leading international universities join forces with CEOs, inventors, senior engineers, and decision-makers from around the world.
This is where the brightest research collides with the most pressing industry challenges — and sparks solutions that drive the future of electronics. I’m honored to be the conference chair, especially on this 30th anniversary of PanPac.
This episode is all about “AI in Action: Progress, Pitfalls, and the Future of Electronics.”
Artificial intelligence is becoming a frequent topic in electronics manufacturing—from inspection and process optimization to predictive maintenance and reliability modeling.
But rather than approaching this conversation from the standpoint of AI evangelists or software developers, we’re taking a different path.
My panelists are: Eva Hymes, Hayden Lee, Dr. Ron Lasky, Dr. John Evans, and Dr. Pradeep Lall.
None of today’s panelists claim to be AI experts. Instead, they are engineers and professors who sit at the intersection of education, engineering, and real-world manufacturing challenges. Their perspective is grounded in physics, data, reliability science, and decades of experience teaching the next generation of engineers—many of whom will be working alongside AI-driven tools whether they choose to or not.
Because all of our panelists come from academia, this conversation intentionally steps back from hype and buzzwords. We’ll focus on how AI is actually being used, where it shows promise, where it introduces risk, and where critical gaps still exist—especially in high-reliability electronics manufacturing. And because PanPac serves the electronics manufacturing community, we’ll keep this discussion connected to the factory floor, workforce readiness, education, and long-term product reliability.
We’ll also touch on broader societal questions, including how AI is shaping engineering education and professional intuition.
So if you’re looking for a grounded, thoughtful discussion on AI—one rooted in engineering reality rather than marketing claims—this episode is for you.
Fred shares insights from consulting with over 150 organizations on the perennial struggle between reactive “heroism” and proactive design. Mojan and Fred discuss the measurable benefits of investing in reliability early—such as reduced development time and lower warranty costs—and why 80% of companies still find themselves trapped in a “build-test-fix” cycle. ᐅ Play Episode
We talk with Mike Payne—owner of Hill Manufacturing and host of By the Numbers from the Making Chips network—about scaling businesses, valuing maintenance, and saving shops from extinction.
Payne shares how neglected maintenance can slash business value, why he’s passionate about helping owners exit successfully, and how his “integrated life” philosophy drives both productivity and purpose.
If you’re in manufacturing leadership, finance, or operations, this one’s for you.
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Mojan and Fred discuss the benefits of using failure models with testing. They explore the delicate balance between theoretical analysis and physical testing. While robust design starts with analysis, they discuss how testing serves as the ultimate “insurance policy” for decision-makers and why understanding the “Confidence Stack-up” is essential for a product’s success.
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This week on CMMSradio, we meet Andrew Forbes — machinist, mentor, and founder of the Make American Manufacturing Great Again foundation (MAMGA). He’s building a pipeline of skilled workers through scholarships and hands-on training. If you care about the future of manufacturing, this episode is for you.
Register at MAMGA here: https://mamga.us/
Hello #reliabilitygang I hope you are all having a productive week. This weeks podcast we talk about Lubrication and why it’s probably one of the most important reliability tasks we carry out. We talk about the effects of poor practice and how damaging a poor lubrication practice can be. We talk about ways to improve practice and how these methods can increase the life of your machines. We also talk about a recent case study poor practice in lubrication caused a critical failure!
We would love to get your thoughts on this weeks podcast in the forum! You can access it below.
https://conditionmonitoring.co.uk/forums/
[Read more…]
In this episode, we’re joined by Alex Bolan from Digital Thinker Inc., fresh off the Streamline Asset Management User Conference. We cover a lot in a short time — from implementation pitfalls to training that actually sticks — with more in-depth episodes coming soon.
One thing Alex makes clear: successful CMMS implementation isn’t magic. It takes full-spectrum buy-in, effective communication, and a plan that doesn’t fall apart under pressure.
Enrico and Fred discuss a listener’s question about using a single sample for testing.
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In this episode CMMSradio talks with Roshan Satish, AI Lead at MaintainX, about how artificial intelligence is being thoughtfully integrated into maintenance workflows. They focus on empowering frontline workers, simplifying data tasks, preserving institutional knowledge, and enhancing CMMS usability—without replacing technicians. Roshan explains how their AI assistant uses real-world interactions, customer habits, and reliable sources to deliver helpful, validated support while avoiding common pitfalls like hallucinations or irrelevant answers.
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Switching systems can be great. The idea is that we can use redundant components to extend the life of a system … and protect the ‘standby’ component from harm until the ‘primary’ component fails. To do this, we need a switch. This often means that we get better reliability than a ‘parallel system’ where both redundant components start wearing out from day one. By protecting the standby component with a switch, reliability can be greatly extended. However, the analysis of a switching system can be challenging. The switch can fail, and the standby component has different reliability characteristics in ‘standby’ and ‘operational’ modes. Many textbooks model switching systems using very basic assumptions to simplify the analysis. But … these assumptions are so inaccurate for most real-world systems that they estimate reliability to be worse than that of a parallel system! This webinar shows you how to model switching (and other complex) systems using Monte Carlo Simulation in Excel … to come up with a ‘perfect’ model to ensure that all that hard work that goes into designing a switching system is not missed by the subsequent analysis! [Read more…]
