Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Creating a plan and generating information is part of reliability engineering, yet it’s not enough. To be a successful engineer, one must communicate well. This means we need to write, discuss, and present well. We are often called upon to examine failures and recommend solutions, examine a dataset and explain the finding, or conduct an experiment and detail the results. [Read more…]
What is supportability? Is it working out how many spare parts you will need (and when)? No. Is it working out how many maintainers or technicians you ill need too keep your system working? Still no. What about working out what tools these maintainers or technicians need? No again. But many people think that this is what ‘supportability’ is. ‘Supportability’ is actual a characteristic of your product or system. Is the ‘ability’ for it to be ‘supported.’ And this can mean different things in different scenarios. It is also not a ‘number.’ If you have two comparable systems, but one of them needs fewer spare parts, is easier to maintain, needs fewer tools, has lots of sensors that gives plenty of warning for maintenance, and so on … then it might be more supportable. But the main thing you need to ‘think about’ regarding supportability is that because it is a characteristic of a product or system … it has to be baked INTO the design. Want to learn more about how to do this? Join us for this webinar.
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A key element of reliability engineering is doing the right thing at the right time. When running an experiment or test, conducting an assessment, or performing an analysis, it is essential that the method we use fits the situation. Being busy does not add value; getting meaningful results does. [Read more…]
Everyone has heard of the ‘bell curve.’ Sports show hosts, teachers, scientists and a bunch of other people routinely use the term ‘bell curve’ to describe uncertainty. But do you know where it comes from? It is not just a ‘pretty shape’ that seems to work, It comes from a really cool physical phenomena that we find everywhere. So the ‘bell curve’ naturally aligns with how our primitive human brain often tries to characterize or visualize uncertainty. The other really cool thing about the bell curve (and lots of other curves that look like bells) is that if we find it in our reliability data, it automatically tells us where to look in order to improve reliability. If you want a basic introduction to one of the most common statistical concepts with NO EQUATIONS … this is the webinar for you!
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This is an overview of the six steps to achieve high reliability from Carl and Fred’s book. Creating and executing a reliability plan that assists the team in designing, manufacturing, and supporting meeting reliability objectives take effort. Let’s discuss the details of that effort such that you focus on the critical steps. [Read more…]
Some of you have heard of HALT (and I don’t mean someone asking you to stop). HALT is a very powerful form of testing to really help us improve the robustness and reliability of new products. So what is HALT? HALT is a targeted test strategy to stress your amazing new product to (and beyond) it’s limits. Which means HALT will break your product (or prototype). Over and over again. Some people ask ‘so what … of course it was going to break when you pushed it that hard?’ But there is a method to this madness. And many organizations have used HALT to create amazing new products that are robust and reliable very quickly (with competitors struggling to understand why). Want to learn more? See you at this webinar!
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We have plenty of options to learn reliability engineering—books, magazines, newsletters, conferences, seminars, etc. We have options. Depending on what you want to know, some options are better than others. Likewise, some options are better than others, depending on what you want to share.
Sounds simple … right? We simply test faster! Great! But what does this get us? Many organizations are faced with a dilemma when it comes to testing to MEASURE reliability. If we test an amazing new product in ‘at use’ conditions, it might take many years before it will fail. This is time we simply don’t have when it comes to product development. So how do we test faster? One of the more obvious answers is to increase the stress. Turn the temperature up. Increase the vibration. Use more voltage. But how do we get this right? How can we know that (for example) one week of accelerated testing is equivalent to 10 years of actual use? This webinar will help introduce you to the idea of Accelerated Life Testing or ALT to help you and your organization make reliability testing a reality.
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Any product is a collection of materials that have been engineered, shaped, and modified to become components and joints (e.g. weld and braze joints). The materials can degrade due to exposure to use conditions – steel screws corrode when exposed to water, some plastics become brittle when exposed to sunlight, and coatings on surfaces can wear away.
Components and joints will stop functioning as required if their materials degrade too much. This is a problem if it leads to reduction or loss of product performance before the end of a product’s expected life.
Identifying the conditions to which materials are exposed and selecting materials that can withstand the exposure is a critical part of designing products that have good reliability.
During this webinar, I will discuss identification of the conditions that can cause materials to degrade. [Read more…]
Redundancy has continually proven to not always be redundant. Whether it be the Fukushima nuclear power plant or United Airlines Flight 232, additional components or subsystems that are supposed to take over when others have failed don’t always work. Why is that? There are quite a few reasons … many of which we already know about. But time and time again, otherwise smart people choose to ignore what we know about how to REALLY make things redundant in order to save costs, save thinking, or otherwise confuse efforts with outcomes. In this webinar, we will look at how redundancy is described in textbooks … and how it can go wrong in the real world.
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The reliability performance of a product or system exists because the decisions that occurred during the creation of the product establish how well an item will survive without failure. The choice of material or finish or technologies along with all the other decisions involved define how well a product performs, including its reliability. [Read more…]
Whether you are new to reliability or a veteran, you have probably heard about the Weibull distribution. It has almost mythical status amongst those who conduct reliability data analysis … or in other words – turning a jumble of dots (data points) into information that actually means something. So why do we ‘worship’ the Weibull distribution? What is so special about it? Whether you have been doing this for a long time or five minutes, you will get something out of this webinar that looks at one of the most popular tools for reliability analysis.
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In my opinion, as I do not know if this is true or not, every product or system failure has a cause. Causes are not exactly the same as what we call ‘failure mechanisms’, yet they are related in many cases. One more term to consider is ‘failure mode’ which is the symptoms or results of a failure. [Read more…]
If you have spent any amount of time doing reliability engineering stuff, you will probably have heard of this thing called a ‘fault tree.’ You may have even used fault trees a lot. But it is amazing how many different reliability engineers have different ideas about how to best use a fault tree. Some think fault trees are strictly used to work out which combinations of components need to fail in order for the system to fail (system reliability modelling). Others think fault trees are really useful for helping us work out what the causes of failure are (root cause analysis). Both people are right. So why do we get these competing schools of thought? Join us for this webinar to learn more about how fault trees can help you … regardless of what you are trying to achieve.
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What is it that makes the difference between good and great related to reliability engineers? What is the magic element that separates those that can carry out tasks such as facilitating an FMEA or designing and analyzing an ALT from those that impact an organization’s culture? A good impact that improves the organization’s ability to create reliable products.