Reliability resources

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Understanding failure mechanisms and components is a critical aspect of reliability engineering, manufacturing, and maintenance across various industries. Whether you’re dealing with machinery, electronic devices, or complex systems, the ability to identify and comprehend how and why failures occur can significantly impact performance, safety, and longevity.  This guide aims to delve into the intricacies of failure mechanisms and the components

Reading Time: 2 minutes

There is great variation when it comes to a common understanding of the term ‘Root Cause Analysis’ or RCA. In a previous, lengthy paper, I wrote an article entitled “The Stigma of RCA: What’s In a Name?“. It focused on common understandings (or misunderstandings) of what RCA means and then described the basic steps of any investigative occupation. I just

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The Stigma of ‘RCA’ Let’s start off with some honesty…the term ‘RCA’ (Root Cause Analysis) is quite vague, misleading and easily misinterpreted by those who are not immersed in its use. It is a useless and counter-productive term because there is no universally accepted, standard definition. Therefore, any process/tool someone is using to solve a problem is likely to be labelled as

Reading Time: 3 minutes

As is typical in our manufacturing organizations, oftentimes it takes high visibility events with catastrophic consequences for a full-blown Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to be conducted. Many of us still have fresh memories of Challenger in our minds from over 17 years ago, and now we are faced with another investigation of equal (if not greater) magnitude.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Root cause analyses are done every day all over the world. Organizations do root cause analysis because it is good business. From an explosion in an auto parts plant to the wrong prescription being given to a patient. Events such as these can have dramatic monetary, physical and psychological effects on an organization. To solve problems down to the true

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Every year, U.S. industry spends well over $300 billion on plant maintenance and operations. An estimated 80% of these dollars are expended to correct chronic failures of machines, systems, and people that occur daily, even hourly, in plants across the country.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Why are Human Assets Important? A realization that appears to be taking hold in corporate America today is that the answer to increased productivity and higher profits lies not in downsizing or even computers. Rather, it is the people who operate our plants and build our products who are our most precious assets. As such, they must be nurtured, encouraged,

Reading Time: 5 minutes

In many ways, this article is a requiem for a time-honored function in plants and processing facilities throughout the chemical industry. In today’s competitive environment, where survival often depends on increasing efficiency to the maximum and reducing costs the minimum, it may be time to lay the traditional concept of “troubleshooting” to its final rest. In its place, we need

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Cada año, la industria estadounidense gasta bastante más de $300 mil millones de dólares en mantenimiento de la planta y sus operaciones. Un estimado 80% de esos dólares se gastan en corregir fallas crónicas en las máquinas y sistemas así como errores humanos. Esto está pasando a toda hora y en toda clase de industrias.

Reading Time: 6 minutes

It’s amazing how quickly failure data (evidence) can disappear after a ‘failure’ has occurred. Following such an unexpected incident, there is sometimes a lot of confusion. Most sporadic/acute incidents occur on off-shifts or on weekends which can add to the confusion. Statistically, for a continuous manufacturing operation, there are more night and weekend hours than normal single-shift operating hours. Nobody

Reading Time: 2 minutes

This case study took place at a nylon plant in Virginia which at the time provided major amounts of nylon to the tire and carpet industries. The plant was incapable of achieving design capacity of 334,000,000 lbs. annually.

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Failure has become a part of every industrial culture around the world; it permeates everything we do in an industrial facility. It is so much a part of our existence that we create elaborate work management and data systems to manage the sheer volume. It is time to change our paradigm to a culture where failure is the exception and