A plan is a guide or roadmap for intended action.

A reliability plan is also a collection of specific tasks and milestones and enhanced with a rationale to allow the entire team fully understand their role accomplishing the reliability objectives.

The plan is a way to achieve the desired business objectives. Meaning the product is reliable enough to meet customer expectations, minimize warranty expenses, and garner market acceptance. The plan is just a plan, it is the accomplishment of the tasks, the decision which improves the design, the signals monitored that stabilize the supply chain and assembly process, that make the difference.

A plan without action is not worth the effort. [Read more…]

Next week is RAMS – the Reliability and Maintainability Symposium. A multitrack 3.5-day conference with classes, tutorials, paper sessions, a small trade show, plus many of you – peers, colleagues, and friends in the reliability world.

The conference is hosted by 9 professional societies and organized by a group of about 50 or so volunteers from those societies (I was an active member of the RAMS management committee for many years). [Read more…]

Product Reliability Design

One way to capture and disseminate reliability engineering related information and advice is through internal documents. This of course only works if they are both useful and used.

Focus on gathering and providing essential and meaningful information that will improve the reliability of your product. Another element that makes these design guidelines valuable is if they save time. Engineers love to save time. [Read more…]

Modeling Complex Systems and Their Variability

Monte Carlo relies on data that describes the variation of elements within the system. It also connects the elements such that they result is an estimate of performance.

For reliability modeling, this is easiest to imagine for a series system.

For a system with two elements in series, a very simple reliability block diagram multiples the expected reliability for each block to determine the system reliability value. Yet, it is possible to have both elements at the low end of the range of possible reliability values, or the high end or a mix.

That is the value of the Monte Carlo approach. [Read more…]