Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
When people think of problem-solving, their mind may instinctively jump to thoughts of things that are broken or things that need fixing.
Problem to most people is a matter or situation regarded as unwelcome or harmful and needing to be dealt with and overcome. [Read more…]
It’s my pleasure to welcome back Fred Schenkel Berg to the podcast.
In this episode we covered:
In order to maximize profitability while complying with government regulations regarding net package contents, food manufacturers and packagers must achieve an optimal balance. Consistent overfilling to minimize risk is inefficient and sacrifices profitability, while aggressive filling practices result in significant risks of non-compliance with net contents regulations leading to potential penalties, loss of reputation, and impaired customer relations. Statistical process control and process capability methods may be utilized to determine optimal targets for product fill weights or volumes for a given process. Subsequent focused efforts to minimize variation will allow the target to be further optimized, resulting in less waste without compromising risk. [Read more…]
Studies show most projects fail due to poor management of known risks. The known risks on a project are:
How to minimize the schedule 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.
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When we’ve identified a risk to our design or user process – and that risk can pose a potential harm – how many controls do we need to add?
We discuss prevention vs. detection controls, ALARP, as low as possible, and some scenarios where we could (and maybe couldn’t) justify a risk as acceptable without adding additional controls.
Let’s start off with some honesty…the term ‘RCA’ (Root Cause Analysis) is quite vague, misleading and easily misinterpreted by those who are not immersed in its use. It is a useless and counter-productive term because there is no universally accepted, standard definition. Therefore, any process/tool someone is using to solve a problem is likely to be labelled as ‘RCA’. It could be troubleshooting, brainstorming and/or some other more structured problem solving approaches such as 5-Whys, fishbone diagrams, causal factor trees and/or logic trees.
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Welcome Gregory Perry to the Podcast. Gregory is a Capacity Assurance Consultant at Fluke Reliability. Today we will discuss asset criticality.
In this episode we covered:
Chris and Fred discussing another question from a listener based on ‘as low as reasonably practicable’ or ALARP. This is used a lot in risk management and analysis … but what is it?
ᐅ Play Episode
Standards are everywhere, and lots of organizations are sourcing and creating them. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission held a workshop 2019 that recently made the news, again, in July 2021. It was called “Nixing the Fix: a Workshop on Repair Restrictions”. Here’s what it’s about: manufacturers are not creating products with standard parts, or their design is created so its difficult for consumers to repair.
Are standards part of the answer? How can we proactively use them for design? Why should we?
Buildings IOT is a:
● System integrator
● Software developer
● Services provider for the built environment: Work spaces, play, and industrial buildings except housing.
In this episode we covered:
Many maintenance organizations invest in a CMMS/EAM in hopes that it will solve their maintenance management problems, only to discover that the software fails to deliver the desired results. Faulty software might be to blame for some CMMS implementation failures, but more often than not, the problems begin well before the software is even implemented. Here are 7 tips for avoiding CMMS failure:
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Welcome Dan Miller to the podcast. Our topic will be metrics; how to pick the right KPIs and we will also discuss cornerstone metrics. But first, about Dan:
Dan is a maintenance reliability engineer at Global Water Resources. The guest worked as a consultant but currently is settled at the water company in Arizona.
In this episode we covered:
Business processes are often talked about, yet not well understood. The big problem with them is that too few people know what the whole process actually should be. Whenever you are following a set of steps to achieve some goal you are following a process. Sometimes various people follow different steps to achieve the same goal. You rely on processes in order to deliver results. If they are ill-conceived or inefficient, then things move slowly and results are more expensive to obtain than they need to be. Well designed, efficient, and consistent processes that integrate with other related business processes keep things running smoothly, costs down, and help to keep people motivated.
Fifty years ago, having your own car was a sign of adulthood and your ticket around town. But that is all going to change within the next five to ten years due to rising CO2 levels and a new trend called Transportation as a Service. TaaS sits at the intersection of four technical macro trends. These are:
More than once or twice, I have heard, if we just got the maintenance department sorted out, our OEE would increase. I have heard this coming from not only operations and management, but also maintenance staff. While it is true that how effective and efficient the maintenance department is will have a direct impact on the operation’s performance, it is not maintenance alone that will enable success.
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