Fundamentals of Life Estimation

By Fred Schenkelberg

September 9, 2025 / 9am Pacific Time

We often face questions, such as: “How long will this last?”, “Will this design survive for at least 5 years?”, and “When should we recommend servicing or replacement?” Being able to provide life estimates is a common skill we need to master.

Life testing is not the only method available to us. We can provide a guess (based on engineering judgement), to modeling and simulation, to field data analysis. And, there are more suitable methods depending on the particular situation.

Let’s explore the range of options available to estimate life for an item, plus the pros and cons of each method. You need to be aware of your options and thus be able to provide the best estimates when asked.

Software Root Cause Analysis (with Fault Trees)

By Chris Jackson

September 23, 2025 /8am Pacific Time (Postponed from August)

Everyone knows how things fail … right? We know that we often have to deal with defects or design oversights that mean parts rub, crack, or erode quicker than we would like. And then something snaps, breaks or stops conducting, so our product stops working. But then there is software … which never fails. And that is because software only ‘fails’ when a coding error or bug makes it do something we didn’t want it to do. So it’s simple human error … which we can’t model, prevent, or create safeguards to prevent these errors … right? Wrong! And that is because software bugs are so common that we know how most of them happen. Which means we can work out what went wrong to allow that bug to happen. And that means we can quickly and efficiently improve software reliability!

Stop the Hidden Spend: The True Price of Machine Misalignment

By Deron Jozokos

September 3, 2025 / 8am Pacific Time

This presentation explores how precision laser alignment significantly reduces the hidden costs of power consumption in industrial settings. By ensuring optimal alignment of rotating machinery, facilities can minimize energy losses, reduce wear and tear, and enhance overall operational efficiency. The session will feature two real-world case studies backed by empirical data, demonstrating measurable cost savings and performance improvements achieved through laser alignment. Attendees will gain insights into the financial and environmental benefits of adopting this technology.

5-Why DOs and DON’Ts

By Mark Galley

September 5, 2025 / 8am Pacific Time

A widely known tool that is regularly misused. An accurate 5-Why provides a simple way to start a cause-and-effect analysis. This webinar covers some important DOs and DON’Ts that will explain how the technique is confused and how it should be used. Topics will include 5-Why Basics and Benefits, Drawbacks and Misuse of a 5-Why, Does a 5-Why align with a Cause Map™ diagram?

The Art of Decision-Making

By Katie Mares

September 8, 2025 / 10am Pacific Time

$150

Join us for “The Art of Decision-Making” session and transform how you make choices in both your personal and professional life. This session will not only provide you with the knowledge to make better decisions but also equip you with the tools to implement these strategies effectively, enhancing both your career trajectory and personal satisfaction.

Areas Covered in the Session:

• Understand the psychology and statistics behind decision-making
• Learn strategies to make confident choices, improving performance by up to 95% (Harvard Business Review)
• Balance intuition and logic, key to 90% of impactful decisions (Forbes)
• Explore the impact of choices on personal growth, crucial for 80% of career advancements (Journal of Applied Psychology)
• Master decision-making in leadership roles, increasing team productivity by up to 40% (American Management Association)

Electrical Fatigue Degradation in Coatings due to Partial Discharges

By Martin Wickham, Dhaval Vankhade and Meenakshy Ramankutty

September 8, 2025 / 6:30am Pacific Time

Degradation of dielectric materials can occur when they are subjected to multiple partial discharges. These may lead to a reduction in their electrical withstanding voltage and result in full dielectric breakdown at significantly lower voltages. NPL has developed capability to test multiple samples simultaneously at low pressure, where partial discharges and subsequent full breakdown can occur at lower voltages. This webinar will give details of the new system and show examples of coating tests, giving the outcomes of applying multiple partial discharges to PCB protective coatings.

Fretting Wear: Can Electroless Gold Replace Electroplated Finishes?

By Soma Roy and Michael Azarian

September 9, 2025 / 8am Pacific Time

Accident/Incident Investigation and Root Cause Analysis

By Joe Keenan

September 9, 2025 / 10am Pacific Time

$150

Accident Investigation – Why is it so Important?

Have you ever seen something unsafe – and not done anything about it? All unsafe acts or conditions should be reported to your supervisor immediately, even if no one was hurt! If you don’t report it, someone could get hurt – and that someone may be you or your co-worker.

In this webinar, you will learn the complete understanding of how to properly conduct an accident/incident investigation to drive to the root cause.

Ten Things a Maintenance Supervisor Should Do

By Ron Moore

September 9, 2025 / 11am Pacific Time

Very often maintenance supervisors feel overwhelmed by the day-to-day disruptions, sometimes crises, that come to them.  It would be a good idea to take a deep breath and consider what they might do to begin the process of minimizing the constant disruption.

Maybe they could start with understanding failure modes, their consequences, and then taking small steps to minimize those failure modes; related to that, having a good understanding of equipment criticality, focusing on those things that matter most to the business; demanding, and supporting, precision maintenance – giving people to tools, time, and training to do a superior job; reinforcing the right behaviors – rewarding excellent work, vs. fast work, for example; holding to the schedule – if you’re always changing it, you don’t really have a schedule, you have a hope, frequently dashed; supporting your team – when someone pushes to get a job done quickly – ask them “Do you want it done fast, or right?”  You have to do things right before you can do them fast; demanding good data and using it openly, reinforcing its value; locating and updating drawings – it’s really frustrating not to have good information available when doing a job; and finally, being the face of equipment reliability, creating an ethos for doing the job right, every time.

How to Improve Production Line Efficiency through Electrical Signature Analysis (ESA)

By Dr. Nicolas Verbeek

September 10, 2025 /11am Central European Time/2am Pacific Time

Free for Members / 35,00 € non-members

Improving production line efficiency requires a proactive approach to maintenance and energy optimisation. Electrical Signature Analysis (ESA) is an innovative solution to these challenges. By analysing equipment consumption and electrical behaviour in real time, ESA enables you to anticipate breakdowns, optimise maintenance, improve energy performance and enhance the reliability of industrial processes.

You will discover how electrical signature analysis can transform industrial maintenance into a proactive and predictive approach. You will learn how to identify faults before they occur, optimise inventory management and improve the energy efficiency of your facilities.

Maximizing OEE & Asset Lifespan Through Adaptive Alignment

By Paul Talla

September 10, 2025 / 8am Pacific Time

Misalignment is a silent killer of industrial machinery, responsible for over 50% of premature failures. While energy savings have traditionally been the focus, the real game-changer lies in boosting Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and extending asset lifespan. This presentation explores how Adaptive Alignment—powered by advanced laser technology and cloud-enabled analytics—reduces unplanned downtime, enhances reliability, and delivers measurable ROI through:

• – 30%+ improvement in OEE by minimizing vibration-induced failures.
• – Doubling bearing and seal life, slashing maintenance costs.
• – Data-driven insights to predict and prevent alignment drift.

Discover how you can turn alignment from a maintenance task into a strategic asset optimization tool.

Analyzing ALT Data

By Dr. Rong Pan

September 10, 2025 / 8:30-11:30am Pacific Time

$300

Accelerated life testing (ALT) is a direct approach to obtaining product failure time information and is widely employed in the product development and reliability improvement process. Companies may use ALTs for multiple purposes, such as quantifying the failure time acceleration factor for specific environmental stress variables, validating a stress-lifetime relationship, and predicting some reliability measures under normal use conditions, etc.

In this webinar, we will first give a thorough presentation of different ALT plans and the varying data forms generated from ALTs. In order to draw valid conclusions from ALT data, proper statistical analysis methods must be chosen. Therefore, we will study both lifetime distribution models and lifetime regression models and demonstrate their usefulness in ALT data analysis. We will show the impact of failure time censoring on distribution parameter estimation and how to select a good regression model from both the physics-of-failure and goodness-of-fit perspectives. This webinar will also provide hands-on exercises using JMP and R. All software codes and step-by-step instructions will be provided to attendees before the webinar.

Water Corrosion Case Studies

By Shane Turcott

September 11, 2025 / 6-10am Pacific Time

$295

Water can attack steel and other metals in various ways. This 4-hour online course walks through nearly forty failure case studies from the refining and petrochemical industries. It uses these cases to (a) explain the conditions that cause different forms of corrosion and (b) show how each mechanism damages metal. By reviewing so many pictures of corrosion failures, useful details not highlighted in the literature become apparent and intuitive.

Leadership and Communication Training Series

By By Brian Stroh

8 Thursdays: September 11, 2025 – October 30, 2025 / 8:30-9:30am Pacific time

$199 members / $299 non-members

The training is designed to give new managers and established leaders skills they can apply immediately within their current environment.  Professionals who attend this program will gain confidence in leadership, communication, team building and performance evaluation.

We’ll cover Self-Leadership, Team Leadership, and Organizational Leadership.

An Insight Into Potential Impact Of An Improved Reliability Definition On Identifying Possible Regulator

By Jingsong Xie

September 11, 2025 / 9am Pacific Time

What needs to be done to ensure the validity of decisions for a safety purpose? Key discussion points that might be of particular interest to the audience include:

1. Why ensuring a complex system meets safety requirements, in particular, is a matter of decision making, thus making valid decisions crucial for successful safety programs.
2. How to establish and maintain an independent management-level decision-making process within safety and reliability programs, and why this independence is vital.
3. Why procedural justice comes into play and it becomes a necessity for achieving valid safety decisions to all stakeholders, including authorized government agencies, system suppliers, and field operations and management.

Defining Predictive Maintenance Activities (Condition Monitoring)

By James Reyes-Picknell

September 11, 2025 / 9am Pacific Time

Free for members / $33.90 non-members

This session will define what predictive maintenance is—and what it is not—outline an approach for selecting it for assets and explain how to determine the appropriate monitoring frequency. Questions and discussion are welcome and encouraged.

Managing Obsolescence – Working with the Secondary Market Safely

By Joey Mertz

September 11, 2025 / 9am Pacific Time

Free for members / $25 non-members

Obsolescence of board level electronics is a growing problem facing a variety of critical programs. Oftentimes, the only option seems to be costly redesigns that take time you don’t have. What if there was a way to extend the runway to redesign and qualify a new part for your board? Better yet, what if there was a way to avoid all of the engineering and approval process all together?

The solution is working with a trusted partner that can cut through the noise, and risk, of working with the secondary market. This presentation will lay out ways to vet a partner and ensure you have the parts you need when you need them. We will detail ways to select partners and ideas to consider before considering redesign. If you are in program management, sustainment, purchasing, supply chain, or engineering join us for an insightful presentation that will give you the tools you need to work with the secondary market, SAFELY.

How a 5-Why Expands Into a Complete Investigation

By Mark Galley

September 12, 2025 / 8am Pacific Time

Every investigation, regardless of its complexity, can begin with a simple 5-Why. Bigger incidents will be broken down into more detail. Even as the investigation expands into a larger analysis it does not contradict the initial 5-Why. Smaller incidents have few parts and bigger incidents have more parts, but the cause-and-effect principle doesn’t change. It can be applied consistently to all incidents.

Customer Service: Customers Only Want Two Things: Winning Loyalty in a Competitive World

By Kevin R. Miller

September 15, 2025 / 10am Pacific Time

$150

There is a big difference between merely satisfying your customers and winning their true loyalty.

In this webinar you will learn how to win loyalty as you do the two things customers want: Solve my problem and Leave me Feeling Great about the Experience. You will leave this webinar with dozens of practical ideas on how to positively interact with every customer in a way that leaves them LOYAL to you and your organization. This webinar is ideal for businesses, non-profits, schools and civic and government teams.

Enterprise Risk Management: Balancing Risk Appetite and Risk Tolerance

By Dev Strischek

September 15, 2025 / 10am Pacific Time

$150

The topic of Enterprise Risk Management continues to be an important element for organizations to successfully manage risk. Yet many organizations still approach the effort as a siloed set of processes instead of as an integrated part of business operations. This can render the program ineffective.

This course covers the basic concepts of Enterprise Risk Management and key elements that finance executives and personnel need to be aware of when implementing ERM across their organizations.

Motor Efficiency…It’s Not Enough!

By Noah Bethel

September 16, 2025 / 11am Pacific Time

While most industrial manufacturers now recognize the importance of motor efficiency, many still do not understand the technology’s significance or that resource efficiency is an additional key to maximizing productivity and profitability. It is imperative for officials to realize that motor efficiency without reduced power consumption is wasteful, motor efficiency without motor reliability is expensive, and motor efficiency and reliability without personnel safety is unnecessary.

Impact Assessment and Risk Management for Change Control

By Alan M. Golden

September 17, 2025 / 12pm Pacific Time

$150

In this webinar we will examine the process of evaluating and completing an impact assessment when applied to change control.

We will discuss how to determine the level of impact assessment needed for what type of changes and how to base this decision on risk.

A major part of the discussion will be the development of tools which can be used to do a complete impact assessment and how this will lead to a change plan to complete any activities needed to fully verify/validate the change. We will also be discussing a tool for doing a change specific risk assessment which highlights the risks associated with the change. Applicable regulatory guidance will also be discussed.

Decision Making and Human Error

By Ginette Collazo

September 18, 2025 / 10-11:30am Pacific Time

$150

In today’s complex and fast-paced world, the ability to make sound decisions and minimize the risk of human error is crucial across various professional domains.

This course is meticulously crafted to provide participants with a deep understanding of the cognitive processes that govern decision-making and the common pitfalls that lead to human errors. Through a blend of theoretical insights, case studies, and practical exercises, participants will gain valuable tools and strategies to optimize decision-making and create a resilient environment that minimizes the likelihood of errors.

After the Pressure Drops – Analysis of Boiler Failures

By Shane Turcott

September 18, 2025 / 10am Pacific Time

Invitation only. Please email shane.turcott@steelimage.com to inquire.

Boilers can fail for a variety of reasons. Diagnosing the failure mechanism and determining additional details regarding its failure is useful for developing repair plans, assessing fitness-for-service and dealing with future reliability. This talk summarizes the resources Steel Image provides to support investigating boiler failures. It uses case studies to illustrate both laboratory-based failure analysis and field metallography to characterize boiler damage.

How Detailed Should Your Root Cause Analysis Be?

By Mark Galley

September 19, 2025 / 8am Pacific Time

Do you want to see the forest or the trees? One of the questions we get often is, “How much detail is enough for my root cause analysis?” If there’s not enough detail, it’s easy to miss important elements within the incident. With too much detail, the investigation will get bogged down with trivial issues – wasting time and frustrating those involved. Because problems in your organization are different severities, different problems need to be worked at different levels. If your company has a one size fits all approach, you will under analyze some problems and overanalyze others. This webinar will explain how your investigations can begin simply, then expand, as needed, into a more complete explanation to reveal a variety of different solution options.

Risk Management

By Gail Kiyomura

September 24, 2025 / 8am Pacific Time

$150

Why you should Attend: You’re job now includes risk management for the company. Learn what are the roles and responsibilities are for a risk manager, how to navigate the world of risk management, and how to use the various methods of risk management.

Areas Covered in the Session: 

• Risk management techniques
• Brokers and Third-Party Administrators

Innovations in Shaft Alignment: An Overview of Laser-Based Systems

By Terry Southall

September 24, 2025 / 8am Pacific Time

This webinar will take attendees through the progression of shaft alignment technologies, starting from string lines and straightedges, through dial indicators, to today’s advanced laser alignment systems. We’ll explore how each method works, the benefits and limitations, and why modern industries are increasingly turning to laser-based solutions for critical machinery alignment. The session will also break down the three primary types of laser shaft alignment systems, Cross-Over Beams, Single-Beam, and Dual-Beam, highlighting their operating principles, accuracy differences, and practical applications. Whether you’re new to alignment or looking to upgrade your technology, this webinar provides a comprehensive overview to help you make informed decisions.

Learning Takeaways:

1. Understand the Evolution: See how shaft alignment methods have progressed from manual to laser-based technologies—and why it matters today.
2. Know the Limitations: Learn the challenges of string and dial methods that laser systems were designed to overcome.
3. Explore Laser System Styles: Discover the pros and cons of Cross-Over Beams, Single-Beam, and Dual-Beam technologies.

Cooling Techniques for Electronic Equipment Overview

By Steve Carlson

September 24, 2025 / 8:30-11:30am Pacific Time

$300

Don’t wait until your electronic equipment over-heats or fails because of poor cooling. Find out if your present systems are adequately cooled, how to avoid many common cooling problems and how to design efficient, reliable cooling systems for many different types of electronic cabinets. This webinar will show designers and engineers an overview of the quick methods for designing electronic equipment to withstand severe thermal environments without failing. Techniques are presented which will permit the evaluation and design of cost effective, compact cooling systems, without the aid of a large digital computer.

Learn simple design rules, and guidelines, which can improve the effective cooling of your sophisticated electronic components used in today’s military, industrial and commercial electronic systems. Learn methods for determining thermal stresses in lead wires and solder joints due to a mismatch in thermal expansions.

Titanic Case Study – How to Start with a 5-Why and Expand it

By Mark Galley

September 26, 2025/ 8am Pacific Time

5Whys is one of the most recognized problem-solving tools. The concept is simple, but its application varies widely. Because it’s misunderstood, 5-Why Cause Mapping root cause analysis is frequently discounted as too simple, not quantitative, and not repeatable. We’ll explain the confusion with each of those criticisms using an example problem. Learn how the effective use of 5-Why Cause Mapping engages your front-line people to find simpler and better solutions.