on Product Reliability

I recently came across this announcement that HP is going to develop computer systems and peripheral devices that are optimized for environments where they are cleaned frequently, often medical environments. In the medical and scientific fields cleaning solutions are a significant stress for plastics, inks and touch control surfaces. It’s a smart strategy to evaluate where your products are used and optimize your test use cases.  It most often will lead to more accurate test results and reliability projections.  It may, as well, lead to a market opportunity that was previously unknown, and if you are the first among your competitors to acknowledge this need and create a specialized or derivative product you now grabbed a portion of the market that you may have not previously held.

A few others

• laptops that are impact and dirt resistant
• Kids winter coats with glove attachments
• Sport tuned models of economy cars
• Stackable chairs
• Folding bikes
• Standing desks

-Adam

I was asked “Do you know about Singularity design?”  I hadn’t heard the term in that context before.

It’s the concept of not approaching design from multiple disciplines.  The design process is done with an approach and knowledge base of all needed disciplines at once and in conjunction.  The electrical system isn’t designed by an electrical team and the mechanical by a mechanical team.  The “Design Team” designs both simultaneously.  Team members knowledge might be rooted in one discipline but there is clearly no boundary to their knowledge of other disciplines.  This would be a mechanical engineer who has designed a PC board before.

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Intuitively, the emphasis in reliability to achieve a reduction in warranty and in-service costs results in some minimal increase in development and manufacturing costs. However, use of the proper techniques during the proper life cycle phase will help to minimize total life cycle cost (LCC).

To minimize total LCC, your organization should do two things:

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The Plan: Saturday and Sunday was skiing in Vermont with the family,  back Sunday night, everyone off to school Monday morning, then to the airport to get to Miami, Tuesday and Wed meetings down there, then fly out Wed night so I’m back to teach classes Thur and Fri here in Boston.  Easy Peesie!

Actual: Finish ski trip feel a little “strange” on flight down to Miami, slight chills.  Tuesday do meetings just barely, Tuesday night it hits like a freight train, The Flu, or Malaria, Aliens. On Wednesday the freight train had fully passed over me so it stopped and spent Wed backing up over me again. Thursday it went forward again over a pile of human jello. I’m not flying out for the clases on Thur and Fri, or anytime soon for that matter. Just getting home is my mission for the week.

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Modular subsystems in a wheelhouse technology may or may not be a staple in your industry.  There are some industries where they are not a standard practice and there are industries where without them, you can’t be a competitor.  Of course there is everything in-between.

First let’s define what a modular subsystem is for this discussion.  A modular subsystem is an assembly that is designed to be integratable into multiple products.  For the automotive industry this could be a transmission.  Each car model a manufacturer makes does not have a unique transmission design.  There may be six transmission types that cover 20 car models.

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I just came back from one of the best RAMS conferences I have attended (In my over 10 years of attending).  I was fortunate enough to present a paper on “Balancing Reliability Goals in the Product Development Process”.  The questions I received were great!  The higher level management of how reliability integrates into product programs is the next big advancement for our discipline.

-Adam

https://youtu.be/YPJBxwIJAi4

An executive asked me how to make a “perfectly reliable product.”

I told him that program would look a lot like an embarrassing market failure that could put a company out of business.

This was not the response he was expecting.  I chose to elaborate before he just walked away.

The investment of time, dollars, and man power to create a “perfectly” reliable product would force such a compromise on all other aspects of the product and program that any type of market success would almost be impossible.  I can only think of two types of products that could benefit from an approach of creating perfect reliability. The two I am thinking of are the Mars Rover ‘Curiosity” and a nuclear power plant. The desire for “perfect reliability” would be driven by either an avoidance of massive loss of life (not just a few lives) or loss of billions of dollars by a single failure mode.

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The Titanic had two sister ships, the Britannic and the Olympic. There was a woman called Violet Jessop, a nurse and a cruise liner stewardess that worked on all three. (That’s her, to the right->)

1. The Olympic crashed into a warship whilst leaving harbor but was able to make it back.
2. She was on the Titanic as it sank and is referenced in the Titanic film, a stewardess that was told to set an example to the non english speaking passengers as the ship sank. She looked after a baby on lifeboat 16 until being rescued by the Carpathia the next day.
3. It’s not known what exactly caused the sinking of the Britannic but the lifeboats hit the water too early. As the ship sank, the rear listed up and a number of the lifeboats were sucked into the propellers. Violet had to jump out of the lifeboat she was in and sustained a serious head injury, but survived.

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