Old Skills + New Tools
Old School Skills and New Tools
Old Guard Skills provides valuable multidisciplinary technical assistance, time-proven experience and new skills on-demand for your organizations success
We're here to help
Experience, Knowledge, Skills, and Perspective
At Old Guard Skills, we draw on decades of multidisciplinary engineering and technical experience to support organizations that need an extra layer of expertise. As companies grow from startup to established operation, they inevitably face new and unfamiliar challenges. Sometimes those challenges require targeted technical support. Whether you’re an EPC firm, a manufacturing operation, or a project‑driven services company, we can help. By combining proven methodologies with modern, state‑of‑the‑practice tools, we help you develop sustainable solutions to both your immediate issues and your long‑term goals. With more than 40 years of experience across diverse technical markets, we can expand your team’s bandwidth, fill capability gaps, and help you anticipate future challenges before they become problems.
How we can help
Consulting
Old-School
with a Fresh Twist
Welcome to our consultancy, where we specialize in supporting small businesses facing growth challenges.
Our experienced team brings a multidisciplinary approach, addressing your unique needs in:
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Quality Management
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Document Management
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Configuration Management
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Engineering Lifecycle Management
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Engineering and Scientific assistance
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Competency Management
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Knowledge (AI) management
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Applied AI for Engineering and Manufacturing
We pride ourselves on our extensive connections, ensuring that if we don’t have the answer, we know someone who does.
Let us help you navigate your path to success with tailored solutions that drive real results.
Training
New Dogs and Old Tricks
Old Dogs and New Tricks
The rapid growth of workplace technology can make it tempting to equate tool adoption with organizational capability. But tool competency is not the same as skills or knowledge — and the reverse is equally true.
Old Guard Skills helps you cut through the noise. We evaluate both mature and emerging tools to identify what truly supports your current operations and future needs.
Clear, effective communication is another critical need in most organizations — from policies to inspection and test procedures. We can help strengthen these foundational elements so your teams work with clarity and consistency.
We also identify targeted educational resources that deliver immediate, positive impact across your organization.
AI Types and Their Practical Value
Modern AI systems can be understood through the lens of the functions they perform. At Old Guard Skills, we focus on how these capabilities support real‑world engineering, operational, and organizational needs. The categories below provide a clear, practical way to think about the different types of AI tools you may encounter.
Optimizing AI
AI that searches for the best possible solution within defined constraints. It improves efficiency, reduces cost, and supports decision‑making in areas like scheduling, routing, resource allocation, and system performance.
Classifying AI
AI that assigns data into predefined categories. It’s widely used for quality control, defect detection, sentiment analysis, and any task where consistent labeling or sorting is required.
Recognizing AI
AI that identifies patterns, objects, or structures within data. This includes computer vision, speech recognition, anomaly detection, and other systems that interpret the physical or digital world.
AI that creates new content based on learned patterns. From text and images to code and synthetic data, generative systems accelerate documentation, design, communication, and knowledge transfer.
Generating AI
AI that summarizes, describes, or extracts meaning from data. It helps organizations understand large datasets through clustering, topic modeling, summarization, and feature extraction.
Characterizing AI
AI that evaluates large numbers of possible combinations to find the best path forward. It’s essential for complex planning, constraint‑heavy scheduling, multi‑step reasoning, and selecting optimal solution sets.
Combinatorial AI
Why This Matters for Your Organization?
Understanding these AI types helps you make informed decisions about where AI can genuinely support your operations — and where it may not. At Old Guard Skills, we help you identify the right AI capabilities for your needs, ensuring that tools enhance your team’s expertise rather than overshadow it.
Reliability Block Diagram | Fault Tree Analysis | Operator Error
Reliability Block Diagram models (RBD) and Fault Tree Analysis models (FTA) are used to evaluate designs for reliability, robustness, and availability.
RBD tools were used to model a system's functional success paths. as a collection of items subject to statistical failure (mean time to failure).
FTA tools were used to identify causal failure paths
Representing Operator Error in an RBD Model
Human involvement is represented as a block such as:
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"Correct Operator Action"
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"Manual Reconfiguration Successful"
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The block reliability is P(correct action)
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Error is implicit (1 - success probability)
RDB elements represent success states rather than failure causes
Representing Operator Error in an FTA Model
Operator error is explicitly modeled as a basic event, such as:
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"Operator Fails to Open Valve"
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"Incorrect diagnosis by Control Room Operator"
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Errors combine with hardware and software failures through Boolean logic
FTA explicity allows human errors to be treated like component failures to support Human Reliability Analysis (HRA)
Human Reliability methods (e.g., THERP) are commonly integrated into fault trees, not RBDs, becaulse FTAs can represent task sequences, cognitive errors, and conditional dependencies.
Practical Guidance
Use RBD when:
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Human action is a single enabling function
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You need insight into the system-level architectural view
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Precision is less important than dependency visibility
Use FTA when:
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Human error is a credible risk driver
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Multiple tasks or decision cases are involved
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You need defensible and auditable risk estimates