Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Continuing the series that started with maintenance supervisor and reliability engineers, if you are new to the position of Operations Supervisor, what are some of the things you can begin working on immediately to improve reliability within the area you work? [Read more…]
Guest Post by Paul Kostek (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Here in Seattle we’ve had several interesting incidents/accidents with personal UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) or drones.
In one case a person flew their UAV into the Space Needle, no damage and no one was hurt; at a parade an operator lost control and hit and knocked out a parade attendee and the operator was cited by police; UAV stuck on power lines over a lake, result – power turned off and UAV recovered at a cost of $35K and the operator was not found; and just recently a UAV was flown into the Ferris wheel on the waterfront, no damage to the wheel though a table on a nearby deck was destroyed.
In the first two of these cases the operators were identified and contacted by Seattle Police. No one has stepped forward in the third and fourth, and since the FAA database is not in place yet, the only means to track them may be through the manufacturer. [Read more…]
Remember that first time you were asked to step into a leadership or management role, or to manage a client relationship? The experience was probably exciting and unsettling at the same time. Something different was asked of you.
While many of us have succeeded as individual contributors or team members, succeeding as a leader or manager requires a new set of skills we have often not been given the opportunity to acquire. This applies whether we carry an official leadership responsibility or not. In a future article it would be interesting to explore the distinction between “leader” and “manager”. [Read more…]
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This is the second part of a mini series on Key Performance Indicators. If you haven’t already please read the first post of this series on KPIs.
KPIs are often used to measure the past performance of a process, but did you know that they can be used to see into the future and predict the performance of the organization?
KPIs can be used to measure past performance, or predict future performance. This is because there is a cause and effect relationship between leading and lagging KPIs. When a process is measured, it will in turn effect another process which is also being measured, providing insight to future performance. [Read more…]
This episode is about the reliability improvement journey of Jason Tranter who is currently the managing director—also the founder and owner—of Mobius Institute. He started his journey when vibration analysis was just in the early phase and organizations were keen to work on condition-based maintenance to have good productivity and improved availability. Reliability in the present times, depends heavily on the availability of the equipment and vibration analysis helps greatly in this endeavor to make your assets more dependable which ultimately improves reliability techniques of an organization. You want the systems to operate when you need them to operate and you make sure that they do so by improving reliability at different levels. This results in increased uptime, quality products leading to time and cost saving. The concept of reliability changes depending on the organizations but the main goal should always be to help the organizations achieve their objectives by taking measurements of running of equipment whenever needed.
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We can’t wait to share our work in progress and our knowledge about improving your reliability program and projects. Looking forward to your comments as you read each chapter.
Here are a few reminders as you get started:
You’ll have immediate access to all available chapters. Click the link below to go to the course home page and get started!
All the best,
Carl Carlson & Fred Schenkelberg
Every company desires to be a leader in achieving high reliability for its products and processes throughout the service life.
This objective can be difficult, given cost and timing pressures experienced by companies around the world today. In order to achieve the highest possible reliability, it is often necessary to develop and implement a Reliability Plan.
Carl Carlson and Fred Schenkelberg have joined together to author a new book on creating and managing effective reliability plans. The book outlines the primary steps to achieving high reliability and follows it up with detailed information about how to implement each of the steps.
We are releasing each chapter as we finish the first draft. The idea is to ask you to read and comment, critic, edit, and make suggestions to improve this new book. Your feedback will help us create the book you need to create effective reliability plans and make significant improvements within your organization.
We first met a few years ago and discovered that our approach to reliability engineering management was very similar. At that time we decided to co-present a tutorial session at the Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (approaching our 6th year).
Based on the tutorial, many conversations with each other and our clients and friends, we decided to write this book. We believe it fills an important need and will help reliability practitioners be successful in their work.
We will post each chapter here and let you know via email when the next chapter is ready for reading.
— Carl Carlson & Fred Schenkelberg
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Guest Post by Ed Perkins (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
One area that does not receive much emphasis in risk management is the human factor. In risk assessments, risk events, likelihoods and consequences, vulnerabilities are the usual focus. People are viewed as ‘weak links’ in risk prevention, but what about risk mitigation? Your risk planning depends on people to respond when an event occurs. How good is their risk decision-making under stress? There is the weak link.
In 1996, IEEE published a book on “Probabilistic Risk Assessment and Management for Engineers and Scientists” by Kumamoto and Henley[1]. This book is about using probability to assess reliability and safety risks in an industrial environment. The book introduces some interesting concepts, such as risk perception and ‘Human Reliability’. [Read more…]
Leadership is not a position or title within an organization. It is an attitude.
You’ve seen the internet meme’s about the difference between leadership and management. There is a difference and while not everyone is going to be in top management, everyone can (and should) be a leader.
As a reliability professional, you are conveniently looked to for leadership. You are expected to use your knowledge and skill to solve problems. To help teams solve problems. To improve the reliability performance of your system and across your industry. [Read more…]
Have you ever felt overwhelmed with too much to do? I imagine most of us have struggled with time management at one time or another. There are just too many things on our plate, and they never go away.
Some may attribute this burden to their life, or perhaps they are inefficient time managers, or something else. Regardless, I doubt many enjoy the feeling or the situation.
If only we could walk across the bridge to self improvement and be enlightened.
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Fred interviews David Nicholls, an engineer Quanterion and Director of the RMQSI Knowledge Center about his work supporting reliability engineers world wide. David Nicholls has been sharing reliability knowledge for years – we talk about the evolution of sharing knowledge and why it’s still important.
One of the most challenging aspects of being a consultant is addressing the musings of those who have accepted defeat.
With a smile of course; and friendly reassurance that you have in fact worked with companies who were worse off and with some training, confidence and a sound business plan they were able to turn things around to a point where people actually enjoyed coming to work. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Ed Perkins (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
There is a lot of literature written on decision making, ‘how to’, best practices, process, factors and so to follow to make ‘good’ decisions. We have been exploring ‘risk based’ decision making in these blogs. We have looked at factors, process, frameworks, psychology and bias.
But we have not discussed perhaps the most important aspect of any decision – implementation or that double edged word ‘execution.’ (Of course this assumes that the decision maker wants something to actually happen as a result of the decision, but that is a topic for another day).
Let’s use the nicer word – Implementation – which implies there is a course of ACTION, with a timeframe for results to be produced or to occur. [Read more…]
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Here is a diagram I generated when I was in the reliability group at my facility.
It came about because I was trying to identify why we may not be showing the value that was expected from the reliability improvement work we were doing. [Read more…]
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