An Interview with Fred Schenkelberg
This week we hear from Fred Schenkelberg on his reliability journey, why Mean Time Between Failure is NOT the best metric to track, and what ARE the best KPIs for your operations. [Read more…]
Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
This week we hear from Fred Schenkelberg on his reliability journey, why Mean Time Between Failure is NOT the best metric to track, and what ARE the best KPIs for your operations. [Read more…]
by Robert Kalwarowsky Leave a Comment
This week, I welcome Fred Schenkelberg back to the show to talk about mean time between failures and the basics of reliability math. Long story short, I hope you’re not using MTBF as a proxy for reliability!
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Follow Fred Schenkelberg on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/fmsreliability/
Check out accendoreliability.com
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by Mike Konrad Leave a Comment
Fred Schenkelberg is an international authority on reliability engineering. He is the reliability expert at FMS Reliability, a reliability engineering and management consulting firm he founded in 2004. Fred left Hewlett Packard’s Reliability Team where he helped create a culture of reliability across HP to assist other organizations. His passion is working with teams to improve product reliability, customer satisfaction, and efficiencies in product development; and to reduce product risk and warranty costs. Fred has a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the United States Military Academy and a Master of Science in Statistics from Stanford University.
by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment
It is always a difficult first day for a reliability engineer in a new place. There are a lot of things to get yourself involved in and there are some tips that can really help you get through that successfully. The job of a reliability engineer requires always moving around, so there is hardly the need of finding the station first. A good reliability engineers always starts with getting the lay of the land first. This would involve getting to know the relevant personnel on the job and the people who can give you basic logistics of it.
In this episode, we covered:
by Robert Kalwarowsky Leave a Comment
This week, I welcome on Fred Schenkelberg. If you haven’t heard of Fred, you haven’t been looking hard enough. Fred runs accendoreliability.com, does reliability consulting, teaches reliability at University of Maryland and hosts the Speaking of Reliability podcast. In this episode, I speak to Fred about the art of reliability. Fred answers what should reliability engineers do? What should we be learning and gives his take on what skills we need.
My calendar has been filling up lately with conferences and I wanted to let you know where I’ll be podcasting and speaking.
I will be in Chicago, Illinois at MaintenanceCon April 15-17th. I’ll be at Reliable Asset World in Clearwater Florida May 14-17 I’ll be at Asset Management Manitoba Summit on June 7th in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
I’m looking for a new opportunity in maintenance & reliability so if you hear of any open positions that I might be suited for please let me know on LinkedIn or send me an email at robsreliabilityproject@gmail.com
If you enjoy the show, please tell your colleagues in reliability about it and follow Rob’s Reliability Project on LinkedIn. I’m putting out, at a minimum, weekly videos for that page so if you follow my personal LinkedIn, you might miss out on some great stuff.
If you have any questions, business inquiries or if you’d like to appear on the podcast, email me at robsreliabilityproject@gmail.com
Follow Fred Schenkelberg on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/fmsreliability/
Check out accendoreliability.com
Follow Rob’s Reliability Project on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/robsreliabilityproject/
Follow Rob’s Reliability Project on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/robsreliabilityproject/
by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment
In every industry, people skills contribute a lot to the success of an employee. The thing is that engineers and especially reliability engineers are not taught soft skills like change management and communication strategies across different facilities in the maintenance and reliability oriented organizations. The reason that engineers don’t have enough soft skills because organizations don’t have enough time or resources to do this. Most of the times, an organization just doesn’t realize how important it is to be able to communicate the procedures in the right way to the people that are concerned with it.
In this episode, we covered:
by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment
This episode is about the learning and value that conferences hold. In SMRP 2018 conference, there were a lot of companies that participated along with their workers so that they learn something new. This yearly conference is a great opportunity for people who are struggling with different things in reliability and maintenance programs. There are presentations, workshops, and discussions all around from where you can learn to change reliability practices, improve, and sustain the process for a long term. There are a lot of new engineers or trainees who are looking for a field that would help them or catch their interest.
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by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment
Every system in the world, no matter how complex, is designed on an algorithm. All the systems use the same basic principles of mathematics. When there is a failure in a system, there’s a logical explanation for its occurrence. Every engineering principles that vendors follow to build the machines and every calculative functionality they add to it so that it will work the way it is is based on mathematics. That’s why it is very important to have strong mathematical foundation in a reliability-oriented organization.
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by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment
Predictive maintenance is the backbone of reliability and maintenance industry. This is why every organization tends to use tools that can help them foresee the possible failures ahead of time and take preemptive measures. No matter how much you spend on building a sustainable program, there are always deficiencies left somewhere. You have to know at every stage what these deficiencies are to successfully get where you want to go exactly. This is where Reliability Growth Analysis (RGA) (or Crow-AMSAA, as oftentimes referred to) helps you with its wide applications. When you have a specific problem, focusing on a single failure mode, and have all the data related to it, it is good to use Weibull Analysis.
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by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment
No matter how good you are at your job, there are always failures in the systems because of some reason. You can’t stop all of them but you can learn from them. There is always something to learn when a failure occurs. Whether it is finding the root cause or devising a solution to prevent it in the future. What happens in the industry that we forget what failures occurred in the last few years?—over the time. This is something that is alarming. It is your job to remember or communicate with those who might. That is how you can better assess the nature and root cause of the failure.
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by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment
The main goal of every organization is to get the quality product in the market. That’s why they spend millions of dollars to stay on the plan they had in place. They can’t do that if their equipment keeps failing. The only way to make it sure is to maintain it properly. And that is a job for reliability engineers. They are the ones who maintain the assets of the company. They find the cause of the failures and stop it by making the system design better. They play a role similar to the process engineer but their job has a wider scope.
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by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment
The organizations that are more innovative and have a mark in the industry tend to do things that others don’t. So, what are those things and how do they do that? This is an area where process engineers play their role to increase the production and solve problems that come along the way. Sometimes they have to experiment using different chemicals, use the calculations, and use the recorded data to come up with processes that can increase the yield of a product without compromising the quality. Their job is to come up with the best ways to quantify product.
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by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment
Do you plan for every factor that can influence the performance of your systems? Are the environmental conditions too much of a problem for you? There are several external factors that influence a reliability improvement program. You can never get the desired output if you don’t try different inputs and see the varied results for yourself and then test and analyze each favorable result until you are satisfied with them. But there is not always enough budget lying around for you to do experimentation just like that. Some companies have a limited budget and tight deadlines and you have to plan for those external factors according to the environmental conditions that your equipment has to face.
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by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment
There are a lot of organizations who buy systems that cost less initially because of limited budget or due to a number of other reasons. They never even bother to bring in the financial or operations experts to get more information from the suppliers about the equipment they are going to purchase. Does it perform all the functions we need? Does it have that built-in reliability mechanism? Will it serve the purpose even? They don’t ask these questions because the initial buying cost is less or fits in with the budget. This is a mistake that leads to expensive maintenance later on.
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by James Kovacevic Leave a Comment
The reliability and maintenance process is never static in the organizations. There’s always something going on around and there are many activities being performed in the company. Now, these activities take time and need money to be done successfully. There are many activities in this list that will cost you millions sometimes. So, how do we get that kind of investment from our financiers? Some of the stakeholders can be convinced by merely good talks and promises of great success but the technical personnel who have spent all their lives running businesses, they can’t be persuaded by such means.
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