Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
What are the gifts others bring to new product development?
It takes intentional actions and acknowledgement to understand how to bring design inputs into our designs from other people.
We consider project teams like a neighborhood and how this frame of mind can help our designs.
Humble, personal, professional, expert or even uninformed; opinions are just opinions when the facts aren’t fully known or understood. Opinionators are merely stating their belief as to the what, why, when, where and the how something has happened and who was responsible, who is culpable and who has to do something. This belief is believed, at least by them, and, for the most part, they expect other people to believe it as well.
Agreement brings harmony, collaboration and progress while disagreement brings confrontation, debate and procrastination while each party attempts to convert the other to their oftentimes sanctimonious viewpoint.
[Read more…]As we celebrate the new year, I am republishing an article I wrote last year, titled “The Future of Reliability Engineering,” as part of the Inside FMEA series. This article applies equally well to FMEA, as you will see.
Sometime in 2023, I will write an article titled “The Future of FMEA.” But, first, I want to hear from readers. Please write me with your ideas on what should be included in the future of FMEA. You can reach me at Carl.Carlson@EffectiveFMEAs.com
Wishing everyone on Accendo Reliability a happy and healthy new year, and best wishes for high reliability and effective FMEAs!
“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
Torbjörn (Tor) Idhammar is President & CEO of IDCON INC. Tor’s responsibilities include training IDCON consultants, developing international partnerships, product development, sales, and marketing. Tor also works with many of IDCON’s multi-site and international clients as the managing partner ensuring that outcomes and deliverables are met.
Prior to becoming IDCON’s president in 2009, Tor worked at over 65 client plants in 15 different countries. During this time he provided clients with advice, reliability and maintenance assessments, seminars, preventive maintenance implementations, planning and scheduling implementation, spare parts management, root cause improvement. He has worked with industries such as steel, refining, chemical, food, mining, other oil and gas, assembly, part manufacturing, large part and machine suppliers and other primary metals refining.
Poor reliability and high maintenance costs are the reality for many industries.
IDCON, a reliability and maintenance management consultant, uses simple, hands-on methods to coach and train existing personnel to improve reliability processes.
Our clients experience fewer breakdowns, more uptime, and lower cost.
Tor is the author of the article series The People Side of Maintenance.
Managing maintenance is 90% about people and 10% about technology. Reliability and maintenance goals can be reached by focusing on behavior change in the organization. Work management, spare parts management, preventive maintenance and root cause failure analysis is about improving how people work in these processes.
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The following is an excerpt from The Process of Reliability Engineering, a book by Carl S. Carlson and Fred Schenkelberg. Within the book see section 8.3.3 Potential reliability methods, for a listing of a wide range of reliability methods to consider when selecting the best methods to inform key decisions.
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Many people believe Proactive Maintenance is the ultimate physical asset management strategy—but there is one better strategy. To get world class reliability at the least cost there must be no maintenance. Only a “wellness” paradigm can achieve that result.
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Often used to pump slurries, helical rotor pumps (also known as progressivity cavity pump, eccentric screw pump, mono pump) use a spiral rotor to move a chamber full of product through the pump. When moving slurries it is critical that the rotor wipes the rubber or elastomer stator firmly, else fine particles get between the rotor and stator and rip material out. This article discusses a major operating problem when the wrong size rotor was used in a stator.
[Read more…]During the product development process, are there so many design prototypes but the team’s still not getting buy-in?
Are design concepts changing mid-development after it’s “too late” to change the design?
Are designs picked-apart only after they’re nearly done?
Late in development, are there many fires to fight with too many surprises at test?
Quality during Design is not about compliance activities. It’s about being proactive with our team in early development. And knowing how to have conversations that gets us what we need so we can engineer designs.
We explore why Quality can help us PRUNE the development process just by the nature of how it’s used.
And we highlight the 3 areas that we focus on in Quality during Design: risk-based decisions, quality and reliability engineering partnership, and the user’s process.
Where do we sometimes need to look for inspiration? Books!
We talk about 11 books in 5 different topics that are useful for different perspectives on engineering and design topics.
And I tell you what I’m most looking forward to reading next.
What book recommendations do you have for me? Please add them to the comments, below.
A process is described as inherently safer if it reduces or eliminates one or more process hazards and this reduction or elimination is accomplished through changes that are permanent and inseparable.Below are strategies for achieving inherent safety:
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What is engineering in the color economy?
We explore facets of sustainable economic models: Green, Blue, Yellow, and Orange.
Where do you fit in now? Where would you like to be? And how can you make design choices within each (or all!) of these color economies?
Based on over 30 years’ experience with project risk management, the best way I found to monitor risk mitigation plans is to incorporate them into the Integrated Master Schedule (IMS). The reason is each month (or week) when the IMS is reviewed the risk mitigation plan is also reviewed. Since the IMS is linked, a slip in a mitigation plan step can readily be seen as well as the potential impact it may have on the project.
The question is How is the risk mitigation plan integrated into the IMS? This paper will explain how it tis done. [Read more…]
A failure reporting, analysis, and corrective action system (FRACAS) is an important part of a reliability program. It is used to solve reliability and maintenance issues throughout a plant’s lifecycle. It uses a strict closed-end loop and iterative root causes analysis process. Properly executed, it can add considerable value to a business. However, there are some implementation traps to avoid and best practice tips that optimize results; here are six common issues to consider. [Read more…]
What makes a great design?
It depends.
We talk about the spectrum of designs (from great to spam), the various customers engineers need to design for, and how engineers can work with their team toward defining what a great design should be.
Robots are developed to address a problem. For example, automating a production line. To achieve this goal, a multidiscipline engineering team is required.
The question is which engineering discipline should I study? I suggest you get a degree in System Engineering. This paper will explain why.
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