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The Role of Statistics in Reliability Engineering

This Isn’t Your High School Statistics Course

What does the word statistics bring to mind when you hear it?  Horrible high school classes that you sat through wondering why do I need this stuff?  Complex math problems what were almost impossible to figure out?  Or is it nonsense that is only used in political polls?

Statistics are used in every aspect of Reliability Engineering.  So if you don’t have a good relationship with statistics, I highly recommend that you are starting […]

What is Reliability Engineering?

An Overview of the Reliability Engineering Discipline

Almost all maintenance, reliability or asset management professionals have heard of reliability engineering.  But what is reliability engineering?  A quick google search will return the following definition “Reliability Engineering is engineering that emphasizes dependability in the lifecycle management of a product. Dependability, or reliability, describes the ability of a system or component to function under stated conditions for a specified period of time.”

This definition seems simple enough in the fact that the reliability […]

Focus on the Important Issues, Not the Many Issues

Utilizing the Pareto Method to Prioritize Improvement Activities

There is limited time, money or resources in every maintenance department.  Sometimes you have 2 of the 3, sometimes just 1.  So how do you prioritize the items or issues that will have the biggest impact on your facility?  There is a simple, yet vital principle that can be used in your facility to determine which issues to focus on.  This principle started in a garden in Italy while studying peas…  This principle […]

By |2019-04-19T15:49:34-04:00June 19th, 2017|Basic Root Cause Analysis, Continuous Improvement, Defect Elimination|Comments Off on Focus on the Important Issues, Not the Many Issues

Should You Worry About IoT If You Don’t Have the Basics Down?

What Good Is The Data If You Don’t Know What To Do With It?

As maintenance, reliability, and asset management professionals, we are in an amazing time.  We can collect virtually limitless amounts of data on the condition of our assets.  With this data, we can determine the exact condition of the assets, predict when the next failure is likely to occur and how it will occur.  Besides, with all of this data, we can move to prescriptive maintenance, where the maintenance actions are determined based on the asset condition, not a predetermined […]

By |2019-04-19T15:49:36-04:00May 29th, 2017|Equipment Strategy, Reliability Engineering|Comments Off on Should You Worry About IoT If You Don’t Have the Basics Down?

Taking a Lean Approach to PM Optimization

How You Have Your PMs Addressing The Right Issues, Make The Effective

In the previous articles, we looked at what type of analysis to use to evaluate the effectiveness of the PMs and if they are cost effective. Once the PMs have been optimized to ensure they are addressing the right failure modes, then they need to be made efficient. Below is an excerpt from a recent article in SMRP’s Solutions Magazine on how to make PM efficient using the lean tools.

PM Optimization is often thought of as an […]

By |2019-04-19T15:49:36-04:00May 15th, 2017|Continuous Improvement, Defect Elimination, Review RCM, Standard Work, Teamwork|Comments Off on Taking a Lean Approach to PM Optimization