Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of articles by:
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
Reliability engineering includes delivering bad news. This piece of equipment will fail soon, this design won’t survive outdoor use.
We start early with engineering judgment on design weaknesses. Continue by organizing groups to evaluate and comment on what will likely fail. We test, prod, poke and force failures to occur. Then we tally the actual performance and compare that to the what we hoped.
We are the bearers of bad news all too often.
So how do you avoid the stigma attached to that bad news? [Read more…]
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.
Engineers solve problems. We optimize solutions.
Engineering starts with a question. The work of engineering is answering those questions. Can we create an antenna with enough range? How can we make a safe autonomous driving car? How much can a delivery drone carry if it has a range of 100 miles?
Reliability engineers are no different. We ask questions and work to answer them. To solve the problems in the pursuit of providing our customers reliable solutions.
In general, there are only a few types of questions a reliability engineer addresses: What will fail, when, and what is the impact of a failure.
The answers are used to design reliable products, optimize supply chains and assembly processes, refine warranty accruals, and identify significant business risks. [Read more…]
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->)
There are many reasons or motivations to learn. From our boss asking us to solve a problem in an unfamiliar field of science, to simple curiosity.
When faced with an unusual failure mode, we need to learn what is causing the failure in order to solve the problem. When exploring a new material, we want to learn how it will fail in our design.
As reliability professionals, we are professional learners or should be.
Let’s take a look at a list of motivations that you may experience that prompt you to learn. When you review the past month or year, you will notice how much you learned.
When you feel one of these motivations, go with it. Learn, grow, and improve your capability as a reliability professional. Furthermore, you can foster these motivations with your team and colleagues, as well. [Read more…]
Toyota just issued a recall of all 1993 Toyota Camrys. Tokyo- “It’s simply time for drivers to move on.” Then added “We understand that the 1993 Camry was tremendously dependable, but, honestly, there’s just no excuse for driving a 24-year-old car at this point. You could have updated features like bluetooth and a backup camera” said Toyota spokesman Haruki Kinoshita. While Toyota is reportedly confining its recall to the 1993 Camry, it also issued a warning to owners of 1994 to 1998 models alerting them to the fact that they were really starting to push it.
I can’t take full credit for that joke. But like most satire it is inspired by a reality. I actually just walked by this car in a parking lot a few hours ago. [Read more…]
The term “Physics of Failure” is used when referring to the underlying mechanism that has driven a failure mode. I have issue with the words “Physics” in this phrase as a “catch all.” This implies we are only working with physical or kinematic interactions when studying product wear-out. Wear-out failures are rooted in chemistry as well. Most electronic failures are chemistry based. If a failure can be 
tracked back to a material property change, dielectrics, brittleness, transformation (oxidation), strength loss based on property change without fatigue, we have a chemistry problem. Mechanical physics does not play a part in understanding the input and response relationship or assist with creating an accelerated life model in these cases.
It can be hard as a reliability engineer to influence the greater organization. Reliability engineers have that awkward dynamic of not just executing the tools they are expert in but directing others to incorporate them into their own process. If the perception is that reliability engineers only instruct others what to do, like a coach, then the perception may be that “they don’t have skin in the game”. If they take complete ownership of reliability activities the effectiveness of any tools influence on the product greatly diminishes. “DfR principle #1, You can’t “Design for Reliability” if the design team isn’t using reliability tools in the design process.
I didn’t create this image but I thought it was an interesting idea. A consumer has captured a niche group of manufactures that are basing their brand on “service for life.” The forever outfit.
I saw this the same day that Tesla came out with their semi truck announcement. A few things that caught my attention from that announcement was how they emphasized reliability and low maintenance in their product profile. “The brake pads will last forever” and “The drivetrain has a 1 million mile warranty.”
What are legislators, regulators and academics doing to help the introduction of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs)? I don’t know either.
One of the sessions of the 2017 Autonomous Vehicle Safety Regulation World Congress that was held in Novi, Michigan, was devoted to ethics. The idea is that AVs must be taught what to do when death is unavoidable (hold that thought). That is, if an accident is imminent, does the AV kill the old lady or the three-month-old baby? Does the AV protect the driver or others around it? Many media outlets, journals and blogs emphasize this conundrum. The MIT Review published Why Self Driving Cars Must be Programmed to Kill where it discussed the behaviors that need to be embedded into AVs to control casualties. Some of you may be familiar with MIT’s Moral Machine which is an online survey aimed at understanding what the public thinks AVs should do in the event of an accident that involves fatalities.
But this discussion has conveniently hurdled the question – do AVs need to be programmed to kill? Because the answer is absolutely not. There is no compelling argument for anyone to expect manufacturers to design this sort of capability into their vehicles. In fact, it is likely going to make matters worse.
A common tool for comparing if two populations are the same is the “student t-test.” This is often used in reliability, and science, if we want to investigate if a factor has caused a change in a respnse.
A population was assembled in location “A”. Another population was assembled in location “B”. Population “A” has an average defect rate of 4%. Population “B” has an average defect rate of 5.5%. Does the location of assembly affect defect rate? That’s just a big argument unless we can project the statistical likelihood that what we have measured is not just an overlap of noise. [Read more…]
Leadership is a difficult term to clearly define. A team leader may have poor or wonderful leadership skills. A product may lead in a market with a broad feature offering, yet not hold a recognized leadership position.
As a reliability engineer, you will find many opportunities to lead. Your ability to provide vision, direction, guidance, and support for a team enables you to affect change and accomplish goals. [Read more…]
The bane of our existence is one thing, generating enough data to demonstrate statistical confidence. Every reliability engineer, every project manager, every Director and VP all have the same moment of panic in a new product development program. In synchronicity they put their head in their hand. It’s when the required number of test units and calendar time to demonstrate a required confidence in the reliability goal is calculated. It’s usually about ten times more units than can be acquired and about two times longer than the entire product development program timeline.
I have been working with clients recently who are keen users of FMEA. Getting engineers to contribute potential failures and their causes is not a problem with these clients, but ensuring that actions are correctly identified and followed up is not so easy. So, what goes wrong? What differentiates a good FMEA from a great FMEA? [Read more…]
