Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
My contention is management many times compromises quality to mitigate budget and cost issues resulting in a major risk to the project.
How to minimize the quality risk on a project is addressed in this paper. The approach to do this is based on my 30 years of project and project risk management experience and knowledge. Let’s start with a story to illustrate my contention.
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It is my pleasure to welcome Ricardo Santos to the podcast, a Senior Manager at Deloitte.
In this episode we covered:
Asset reliability programs are a set of initiatives for tracking the health, effectiveness and locations of both fixed and moveable assets. It involves routine maintenance, as well as the collection and analysis of equipment operating data to measure efficiency throughout their useful lives.
A good reliability engineering program provides insight on the frequency of asset failures, cost of operation, maintenance and repair, and the quality of maintenance work. Over time, an organization needs to evaluate metrics such as mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), and mean time to failure (MTTF) to ascertain the suitability of the selected maintenance strategy. [Read more…]
George is a reliability leader who discovered his passion in this realm when he wanted to discover a better way to improve overall operations as a new production supervisor right out of college. Since then he has spent a large portion of his career working for a few large food and beverage organizations where he has driven fundamental improvement in foundational maintenance and reliability practices through connecting people and processes. With a strong passion to always excel with cross functional teams, he has strived to challenge the status quo to help the organization address gaps through a strategic and organized fashion. George realized early in his career that genuine leadership allows us all to be successful in the day to day work we do, to not only empower ourselves but others to reach the goals of the organization. From implementing CMMS systems to developing technical training programs for new engineers to working with senior leaders in developing reliability strategy, George loves working with people and leading strategic change. George is currently responsible for leading a new the global asset management programs for Facebook data center operations. Outside of work, George loves traveling around the world with his wife Daysi and is a San Francisco Bay Area sports fanatic. George received his Bachelors of Mechanical Engineering from SF State University and a double Masters in Engineering and Business from San Jose State University.
When facilitating a Root Cause Analysis (RCA), the proper questioning process will make or break the effectiveness of the entire analysis. When we hear of the 5-Why’s as a valid RCA approach, is simply asking ‘Why?’ 5x good enough….or IS IT JUST OK?
Think about it this way, if I asked you ‘How Could’ the crime have occurred versus ‘Why’ the crime occurred, would your answers be different?
I am going to take a very basic (101) case study and format it using a logic tree (graphical expression of cause-and-effect logic). As we are guided through this mental process we will discuss the differences between asking ‘How Can?’ and ‘Why?’.
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Guest Post by Andrew Sheves (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Many people have a few smoke alarms dotted around their house and, to me, these are some of the most straightforward set-it-and-forget-it risk management tools you can get. You set these up and then…nothing. You can forget about them until that annoying ‘chirp’ sound wakes you up one night, telling you to change the battery.
And most people will never hear their smoke alarm go off except for those times that their cooking gets a little out of hand.
However, if there were a fire, they’d know about it immediately and be able to react.
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The prime role of Maintenance is to reduce operating risk. Maintenance serves a business well when its use leads to lower production costs than using other choices that could have been taken. Too many managers think that they must maintain plant and equipment. Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. Maintenance is expensive and, as far as it is safe, use less costly answers. But if you do choose to do maintenance, then you ought to pick an operation’s maintenance strategy mix based totally on its effectiveness in delivering the least operating costs for the least maintenance cost.
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Akshay is the host of the podcast Reliability it Matters!.
At Reliability – It Matters! We try to dispel common misconceptions around Reliability and speak to Industry experts on their Reliability journey and leverage their experience. We will also break down complex Reliability topics and explain them in a simple manner.
Akshay’s author archive lists contributions of articles and episodes.
During World War Two, the Office of Special Services (OSS), the forerunner of today’s Central Intelligence Agency, compiled a manual on how to ruin a factory’s output without explosives. Their main weapon was bad maintenance.
The manual described ways that transportation and industrial workers could do their jobs but intentionally damage their plant and organization. The main idea was to do their jobs poorly, in a way where bad workmanship was plausibly accidental. Some of the targets were boilers, housekeeping, turbines, fusing, motors, tools, building heat, fuel storage, and lubricating oil systems.
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With twenty plus years of working with companies around the world, I’ve been witness to some incredible improvements. From a small company that was still working with paper work orders to large companies who struggled to make sense of their CMMS, the common thread for those who realized success was the discipline to implement and perform their RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance) tasks.
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Within our quality toolbox, there are a lot of graphical organizers. Some are better at fulfilling different goals than others. If we have a goal in mind, then we may choose a certain tool. However, we don’t want analysis paralysis about which tool is best to stop us from using any tool at all.
I share my 3 general guidelines about choosing a graphical quality tool, how to draw them, and when to use them.
Plus, we talk about 3 tools in particular, prompted by a social media ask: mind map, process flowchart, and spaghetti diagram. We get into what they are, when we’re most likely to use them, and how they can be used for design.
Tech is needed, but do not focus only on the tool – implementation is key. For my musical aspirations that means the acquisition of a tool (the instrument), making sure it is set up correctly (tuning and positioning), investment in lessons and practice, using it regularly, and eventually, someone will tell me it sounds good. That’s my goal, and incidentally, I’m not there yet.
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The title is a Statistician’s Lament. “Design of Experiments (DoE) is the design of any task that aims to describe or explain the variation of information under conditions that are hypothesized to reflect the variation.” [Wikipedia] Are you using DoE to design reliability tests? What do PH, GMDH, and |D|-optimality have to do with design of DoE of reliability tests?
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Digital transformation for huge potential business benefit uses the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) combined. Like any technology or tool, they must be used correctly or the results you want will be elusive.
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In the previous article (Enabling Agile Enterprise Risk Management Part II: Disciplines) I identified the disciplines necessary to enable you to transform your enterprise at speed. At the conclusion of that article, I promised to present a design for a repository and system to support AERM. This article will fulfill that promise.
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