Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Behind all lasting business success is the ability to make business processes work successfully. Random success in business is due to luck. But lasting success relies on knowing how to use statistical process control to make your processes more successful more often.
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“His Majesty Will Have A Fleet Upon The Durability Of Which There May Be Some Dependence.”
In 1763, the Seven Years’ War ended and the Royal Navy demobilized. The Earl of Sandwich left the office of the First Lord of the Admiralty for the second time. At the end of the war, Britain had 149 ships of the line. Scrapping, retirement, and storage reduced the fleet size and maintenance requirements. The navy was trying to manage a shrinking fleet with a shrinking budget.
In 1763, the Admiralty requested a report of the total value of all ships and their stores, and an analysis of the “annual cost of replacing them in cycles between twelve and sixteen years,” according to historian N. A. M. Rodger. The Admiralty also asked for an estimate for annual repair and maintenance at task work rates if they expanded the number of shipwrights to 3000. (Shipwrights were the carpenters in dockyards who built and repaired ships.)
By 1765, only 47 of the 140 ships were in good condition. The Navy Board made a plan to increase the number of ships in good condition to from 47 to 63, but the plan required three years and an extra £2,000,000. Once restored to good condition, the plan assumed that the existing shipwright workforce could maintain a fleet of 90 ships. This approach would only work if the shipwrights were allowed to maximize overtime all summer, for every summer to come…the workforce and labor budget were at maximum capacity. To actually maintain 140 ships in good condition, the shipwright workforce would have to be expanded from 3,150 to 4,200. The government did not want to expand its civilian industrial labor base at a time when it expected a peace dividend.
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The fundamental purpose of Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability (RAM) modeling is quantifying system performance, typically in a future interval of time. A system is a collection of items whose coordinated operation leads to the output, generally a production value. The collection of items includes subsystems, components, software, human operations, etc. For example, an automobile can be considered as a system with sub-components being the drivetrain, engine, gearbox, etc. In RAM models, it is crucial to account for relationships between items to determine the final output of the system. In various industries, RAM models have proven to be effective as cost avoidance or decision-making tools, as well as their ability to confirm or counter stated assumptions by internal stakeholders.
This paper highlights a non-exhaustive list of seven diverse solutions that a RAM model can bring to the organization in terms of decision-making advantages.
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Covid taught us the importance of managing suppliers, especially those from China and Asia. Risk became the top supply management concern over supplier delivery, quality, and cost. For example, just-in-time deliveries became just-in-case—many common sense ideas of lean changed. Incoming, in-process, and final inventories rose. Overall costs increased. Risk became the overarching concern for managing suppliers. [Read more…]
How well should a maintenance job be planned ? All maintenance work needs a plan that lets the maintainer do the work correctly, safely, in the least possible time and for the least cost. Selecting the information and details that go into the maintenance job plan is vital to its success. Leave out necessary specifics and facts and you put the job at increased risk of failure, loss and waste. Exactly what details are necessary to allow maintenance work to flow wonderfully well at minimal cost and time are important for a maintenance planner and their managers to know.
[Read more…]Covid taught us the importance of managing suppliers, especially those from China and Asia. Risk became the top supply management concern over supplier delivery, quality, and cost. For example, just-in-time deliveries became just-in-case—many common sense ideas of lean changed. Incoming, in-process, and final inventories rose. Overall costs increased. Risk became the overarching concern for managing suppliers.
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Reliability Engineering for Heavy IndustryOffered via Pardus Consulting
$249
This is the course I wish I had when I started my Reliability Engineering journey in Heavy Industry – a course that eliminates all the unnecessary “fluff” and zeroes in on the core, applicable aspects of Reliability Engineering.
A perfect combination of advanced theory transformed into practical problem solving (in Excel) on the most pressing issues Reliability Engineers face today.
Topics include:
My goal for this course is to equip you with the knowledge and skills to deliver value and change within your organization from day one! Excel templates are provided for you to work through the course exercises, but also to use in your day-to-day profession.
This course is designed for Reliability Engineers already in industry looking to expand their knowledge and toolkit, as well as for those wishing to move into the profession.
Sign up today!!
This course hits the nail on the head! So many other online Reliability Engineering courses just copy paste generalised concepts from the internet.
You can tell a lot of effort went into making this course as the problems are super relevant to what I do for work in engineering, and this gives a step by step way of solving them in Excel.
Kudos to the Instructor! ~ Michael
On-Demand and On-Line via Pardus Consulting
Great course! Really loved how detailed the lifecycle costing exercise was. Particularly impressed with the section where the instructor ran through performing monte carlo simulations in Excel, I havent seen it better explained anywhere else but here.. ~ Jeff
Cost
$249
Most of us are well aware of the supply chain shortages, both within our industry and well beyond. Some of us are also keenly aware of labor shortages. This show is all about reliability of circuit assemblies. While reliability is often referred to as a process, it is also rooted in culture.
Reliability begins with people. So, instead of talking about common reliability, subjects, such as voiding, soldering materials, assembly, best practices, and the plethora of other usual suspect topics,
I thought it would be a good idea to talk about people. After all, as I said, reliability begins with people.
My guest today is Dr. John Mitchell. Many of you know John as the president and CEO of IPC, one of our industries largest trade associations. John has recently written a book, entitled fire your hiring habits. I have to admit, the title is quite intriguing.
Here’s a little background on John. Since 2012, Dr. John Mitchell has served as president and CEO of IPC, a not-for-profit trade association driving competitive advantage for more than 3,000 companies across the globe. Leading the global operations and staff, John manages the creation and execution of the Board of Director’s goals.
Under his leadership, IPC has essentially doubled the total company membership globally as well increased the acceptance of standards by over 50 percent. John led the charge for IPC’s Online Certification Portal and the company’s overhaul of it Member Success department. His efforts served to improve relations with members and helped move the needle on positive regulatory change.
Prior to IPC, John was an engineer with General Electric Aerospace and was a founding member of Alpine Electronic’s research company—which pioneered modern navigation systems in the U.S. OEM market. John himself holds a patent in GPS navigation systems. John then served as general manager/director of the largest product development initiative in Bose Corporation’s history. He went on to become CEO of Golden Key International Society, the noted collegiate honor society serving over two-million members.
John earned his doctorate in higher education management from University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education, a Master of Business Administration from Pepperdine University, and a Bachelor of Science in electrical and computer engineering from Brigham Young University. In addition to his work with IPC, John is an in-demand speaker and the author of two books so far (sounds like more books may be in the works… I need to ask him about that!).
Fire Your Hiring Habits is available at most book sellers including Amazon:https://tinyurl.com/fire-your-hiring-habits
By 1792, six Royal Navy dockyards employed about 1500 workers each. The dockyards had a wider variety of technical specialties than was found in any other manufacturing enterprise. The dockyards “were some of the largest manufactories in Europe and dwarfed almost all private industries.” (Morriss) The dockyards built new ships, but maintaining ships was just as important. The Royal Navy’s dockyards constituted one of the largest industrial maintenance organizations in the world…and their only peer organizations in terms of the scale of maintenance management were the dockyards of other superpower navies.
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Fist to five voting is a simple and effective way to gather group feedback or to gauge consensus in a meeting or discussion. In this method, participants are asked to rate their level of support for an idea or proposal on a scale of 1 to 5, using their fingers. However, fist to five is a decision-making technique that should be described in the project charter and agreed upon by all participants. Ample time should be allowed between the initial poll and the final vote for negotiation and agreement to occur. [Read more…]
Some common reasons why requirements can cause risk to a project are:
This paper explains how poorly defined requirements can impact the project.
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.
[Read more…]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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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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