Let’s say you have shipped 1,000 products to your customer on January 1st. All are immediately placed into service. And each month since you have received a few product returns, what we are going to call failures. We also have fitted the data to a Weibull distribution. Then in May, your boss asks you to estimate how many failures to expect in June. Continue reading
I like to say Reliability is all about quality over time. Quality professionals tend to say reliability is an element of quality. David A. Garvin of the Harvard Business School suggests there are eight dimensions to quality, including reliability.
Either way one relates quality and reliability we need to remember that quality or reliability are not a department, team, the engineering down the hall. Quality and reliability are part of the culture of the organization. It is how we make decisions the impact how the product or service performs for customers. Continue reading
Data Outliers and QuestionsWhen looking at a pile of data, sometimes there is a data point that is not like the others. It attracts attention as it is different than the rest of the data.
When I spot something odd in a dataset, I wonder if there is something to learn here. Is this an opportunity to make a discovery or improve a process? Continue reading
We can plan to do more than we are capable of accomplishing. The remaining items, if they warranty accomplishing become deferred. They roll over to the next’s day’s list of actions to take.
Of course, in practice, the process to plan, execute, and defer maintenance activities is a bit more complex than described above. The ability to maintain equipment in working order along with minimizing downtime and costs is in large part the balance between resources available to conduct maintenance and the increased risk of system failure due to deferred maintenance. Continue reading
A risk management plan has to meet your organizations needs as the organization identifies, manages, and mitigates potential and actual risks. The ISO 31000 framework does not detail how an organization should plan or what elements are required for an effective plan.This short article outlines a few details that may comprise a starting point as you build a risk management plan within your organization. Or, the suggestions here may help you review and improve your existing plan. Continue reading