Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
In this episode of CMMSradio, we meet the team from Wear Check International – Jon Fazenbaker, Leila Morzan-Lantos, Andreas “Andy” Lantos, and Bill Quesnel – To hear about their plans for RP2025 and their passions for the maintenance and lubrication industry.
Connect with Team WearCheck here: https://wearcheck.com/
Dianna and Fred discuss the importance of standard reliability methods within a company, to ensure teams are using effective, proven techniques rather than just following a generic recipe.
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This week we sat down with Bryan Bieschke (“Just a Mechanic”) of UpKeep for one of the most honest conversations we’ve had about CMMS implementation.
Spoiler alert: most failures aren’t about the software — they’re about unclear roles, leadership gaps, and chasing tools instead of outcomes.
💡 Some 🔑 takeaways:
If you’re implementing a CMMS or thinking about it, this one’s a must-listen. No fluff. Just hard-earned lessons from the field. 🎧
Grab a discovery call and demo here: https://upkeep.com/cmmsradio/
Kirk and Fred discuss questions that can reveal some job candidates’ knowledge or lack of understanding of new product reliability development ᐅ Play Episode
On this episode of CMMSradio, Andy Gager of AMG International lays out the no-nonsense path to CMMS success. From selecting the right system to avoiding common pitfalls, Andy shares what works—and what derails even the best intentions.
🔑 Key Takeaways:
Amazing products are 90 % identical to mediocre products. It is that last 10 % where failures, forgotten features, overlooked interfaces, and all manner of other things reside. FMEAs and FMECAs are tremendously powerful tools (when done right) at finding the ‘vital few’ things you can address in your first and early design iterations that make everything else that follows a breeze. FMEAs and FMECAs are also awful (when done wrong), as they waste everyone’s time, create no meaningful design guidance, and are just forced upon the tragic few. Then there is AI … which promises to do it all for us! This is not the case. Beyond what standard ‘ISO/IEC 23894:2023 – AI and Risk Management’ says you can and can’t do, AI can only help you get on top of that 90 %. That 90 % is absolutely essential – but at best, AI can quickly get you to mediocre. It is the human brain that takes care of the rest. This webinar gives you 10 reasons why you should do FMEAs and FMECAs properly – and use AI to accelerate getting on top of that 90 % so you can focus on that amazing new product.
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In electronics manufacturing, defects don’t usually announce themselves. They happen in milliseconds, far faster than human perception, and often long before anyone realizes a process has drifted out of control. By the time failures show up in test, inspection, or worse, in the field, the root cause may be buried deep inside machine behavior that no one thought to question.
When machines are assumed to be accurate instead of proven to be accurate, and when force is set but not verified, hidden variation creeps in. That variation can translate directly into cracked components, misalignment, latent damage, and long-term reliability risk.
My guest today is Michael Sivigny, SMT Productivity & Profit Strategist and owner and General Manager CeTaQ Americas, a company that has spent decades doing what most factories don’t, objectively measuring machine performance under real production conditions.
Michael’s work has repeatedly shown that even well-maintained, recently serviced equipment can operate outside of specification, quietly generating defects at high speed.
In this conversation, we’ll dig into how accuracy validation and force measurement expose problems traditional troubleshooting misses, why OEM calibration alone is no longer enough for today’s miniaturized electronics, and how statistically sound measurement practices improve not only yield and uptime, but long-term product reliability.
If you believe reliability starts long before functional test, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.
CeTaQ Americas
msivigny@cetaq-americas.com
In this insightful episode, Andrew Daddo interviews Manuel Cifuentes, Head of Maintenance Strategy Governance at BHP. Manuel reflects on his 18-year journey with the company, discussing the evolution of maintenance from a “nerdy” technical focus to a critical business strategy. He explains the challenge of translating complex technical data into language that resonates with business leaders. By simplifying terms like MTBF and highlighting the financial impact of equipment failures, Cifuentes helped shift organizational culture. He emphasizes that success required not just technical improvements but also fostering better communication and soft skills across the company.
Dan Anderson, of ReliabilityX, joins CMMSradio from the 2025 Streamline Asset Management User Conference in Greenville, SC. We learn about part of his journey – including the Datastream days – and his views on the overall asset management space from a maintenance and reliability perspective.
Dan has been around the game – Tune in and hear what he has to say. He’s a real pro and knows how to add value! Thank you, Dan, for being on CMMSradio!!
Kirk and Fred discuss the process of finding a job in Reliability Engineering ᐅ Play Episode
Paul Crocker, CMRP is with ReliabilityX! We jumped on to record about his interest in photography and how that fits well into the maintenance and reliability space. It’s fascinating to see how these worlds converge, or maybe collide, only to find out how much value comes from combining an interest like this in a valuable, impactful way, to the industry we all love!!
Chris and Fred discuss a few ideas on creating a reliability team in your organization.
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In this CMMSradio episode, Marc Laplant of Hexagon Asset Lifecycle Intelligence discusses the importance of ISO 55000 in asset management. The framework ensures alignment between management and operations, focusing on processes, policies, and leadership. He highlights starting small and improving iteratively, and shares insights on condition monitoring’s role in decision-making. The episode concludes with his thoughts on work-life balance and continuous personal growth.
Key Topics:
Every product team faces the “design fog” during early concept development. This lack of clarity and alignment often means teams are discussing technical architecture and feature lists before they’ve even agreed on the fundamental customer benefits and problems they need to solve. This unstructured approach frequently leads to wasted effort, cost overruns, and products that miss the mark.
The solution isn’t more bureaucracy; it’s a shared, intentional structure. In this episode, we introduce two powerful frameworks designed to bring clarity to this critical phase: the Concept Space Model and the ADEPT Team Framework. These models are grounded in decades of quality and reliability research, providing a map for navigating the difficult terrain of concept development.
By adopting these frameworks, you ensure that every team member is aligned on the targeted benefits, the user journey, and the potential problems to avoid, transforming chaotic brainstorming into productive, focused co-creation sessions that yield clear design inputs for engineering. Let’s dive into how to use the ADEPT Team Framework to ensure your next project is built on a foundation of shared understanding.
Good Morning my #reliabilitygang! Welcome back to episode 2 of Maintain reliable talk. Today we have some BIG announcements. I take you through some exciting new ventures and building a reliability community. I also talk in the second half about types of maintenance and why each one may be used depending on the plant or process. I hope enjoy it and I hope you all have a productive week.
