Accendo Reliability

Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site

  • Home
  • About
    • Contributors
    • About Us
    • Colophon
    • Survey
  • Reliability.fm
    • Speaking Of Reliability
    • Rooted in Reliability: The Plant Performance Podcast
    • Quality during Design
    • CMMSradio
    • Way of the Quality Warrior
    • Critical Talks
    • Asset Performance
    • Dare to Know
    • Maintenance Disrupted
    • Metal Conversations
    • The Leadership Connection
    • Practical Reliability Podcast
    • Reliability Hero
    • Reliability Matters
    • Reliability it Matters
    • Maintenance Mavericks Podcast
    • Women in Maintenance
    • Accendo Reliability Webinar Series
  • Articles
    • CRE Preparation Notes
    • NoMTBF
    • on Leadership & Career
      • Advanced Engineering Culture
      • ASQR&R
      • Engineering Leadership
      • Managing in the 2000s
      • Product Development and Process Improvement
    • on Maintenance Reliability
      • Aasan Asset Management
      • AI & Predictive Maintenance
      • Asset Management in the Mining Industry
      • CMMS and Maintenance Management
      • CMMS and Reliability
      • Conscious Asset
      • EAM & CMMS
      • Everyday RCM
      • History of Maintenance Management
      • Life Cycle Asset Management
      • Maintenance and Reliability
      • Maintenance Management
      • Plant Maintenance
      • Process Plant Reliability Engineering
      • RCM Blitz®
      • ReliabilityXperience
      • Rob’s Reliability Project
      • The Intelligent Transformer Blog
      • The People Side of Maintenance
      • The Reliability Mindset
    • on Product Reliability
      • Accelerated Reliability
      • Achieving the Benefits of Reliability
      • Apex Ridge
      • Breaking Bad for Reliability
      • Field Reliability Data Analysis
      • Metals Engineering and Product Reliability
      • Musings on Reliability and Maintenance Topics
      • Product Validation
      • Reliability by Design
      • Reliability Competence
      • Reliability Engineering Insights
      • Reliability in Emerging Technology
      • Reliability Knowledge
    • on Risk & Safety
      • CERM® Risk Insights
      • Equipment Risk and Reliability in Downhole Applications
      • Operational Risk Process Safety
    • on Systems Thinking
      • The RCA
      • Communicating with FINESSE
    • on Tools & Techniques
      • Big Data & Analytics
      • Experimental Design for NPD
      • Innovative Thinking in Reliability and Durability
      • Inside and Beyond HALT
      • Inside FMEA
      • Institute of Quality & Reliability
      • Integral Concepts
      • Learning from Failures
      • Progress in Field Reliability?
      • R for Engineering
      • Reliability Engineering Using Python
      • Reliability Reflections
      • Statistical Methods for Failure-Time Data
      • Testing 1 2 3
      • The Hardware Product Develoment Lifecycle
      • The Manufacturing Academy
  • eBooks
  • Resources
    • Accendo Authors
    • FMEA Resources
    • Glossary
    • Feed Forward Publications
    • Openings
    • Books
    • Webinar Sources
    • Journals
    • Higher Education
    • Podcasts
  • Courses
    • Your Courses
    • 14 Ways to Acquire Reliability Engineering Knowledge
    • Live Courses
      • Introduction to Reliability Engineering & Accelerated Testings Course Landing Page
      • Advanced Accelerated Testing Course Landing Page
    • Integral Concepts Courses
      • Reliability Analysis Methods Course Landing Page
      • Applied Reliability Analysis Course Landing Page
      • Statistics, Hypothesis Testing, & Regression Modeling Course Landing Page
      • Measurement System Assessment Course Landing Page
      • SPC & Process Capability Course Landing Page
      • Design of Experiments Course Landing Page
    • The Manufacturing Academy Courses
      • An Introduction to Reliability Engineering
      • Reliability Engineering Statistics
      • An Introduction to Quality Engineering
      • Quality Engineering Statistics
      • FMEA in Practice
      • Process Capability Analysis course
      • Root Cause Analysis and the 8D Corrective Action Process course
      • Return on Investment online course
    • Industrial Metallurgist Courses
    • FMEA courses Powered by The Luminous Group
      • FMEA Introduction
      • AIAG & VDA FMEA Methodology
    • Barringer Process Reliability Introduction
      • Barringer Process Reliability Introduction Course Landing Page
    • Fault Tree Analysis (FTA)
    • Foundations of RCM online course
    • Reliability Engineering for Heavy Industry
    • How to be an Online Student
    • Quondam Courses
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming Live Events
    • Accendo Reliability Webinar Series
  • Calendar
    • Call for Papers Listing
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • Webinar Calendar
  • Login
    • Member Home
Home » Articles » on Tools & Techniques » Page 5

on Tools & Techniques

A listing in reverse chronological order of articles by:



  • Dennis Craggs — Big Data Analytics series

  • Perry Parendo — Experimental Design for NPD series

  • Dev Raheja — Innovative Thinking in Reliability and Durability series

  • Oleg Ivanov — Inside and Beyond HALT series

  • Carl Carlson — Inside FMEA series

  • Steven Wachs — Integral Concepts series

  • Shane Turcott — Learning from Failures series

  • Larry George — Progress in Field Reliability? series

  • Gabor Szabo — R for Engineering series

  • Matthew Reid — Reliability Engineering Using Python series

  • Kevin Stewart — Reliability Reflections series

  • Anne Meixner — Testing 1 2 3 series

  • Ray Harkins — The Manufacturing Academy series

by Hemant Urdhwareshe Leave a Comment

Response Surface Designs: Part-1 Addition of Centerpoint

Response Surface Designs: Part-1 Addition of Centerpoint

Dear friends, I am posting a video after some gap! This is our first video in our series on Response Surface Designs. Response Surface Designs become necessary when we want to model a second order response in an experiment. In this first video, Hemant Urdhwareshe explains addition of centerpoint to a factorial design to assess presence of non-linearity in the response. The concept is explained with a virtual catapult with a two-factor two-level design.

Links to the related videos:

(1) DOE-1: Introduction to Design of Experiments

(2) DOE-8: Linearity and Orthogonality in Experimental Design

(3) DOE-6: Case Study in Creating Full Factorial Design in Minitab

(4) DOE-7: Analyse Factorial Design with Minitab

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Institute of Quality & Reliability, on Tools & Techniques

by Hemant Urdhwareshe Leave a Comment

SPC-2: Proportion Defective and Number Defective charts (p and np charts)

SPC-2: Proportion Defective and Number Defective charts (p and np charts)

Dear friends, we are happy to release this second video on statistical process control charts. In this video, Hemant Urdhwareshe illustrates how to use attributes charts, specifically p-charts for proportion defective and np charts for number defective! Watch our video SPC-1 for Introduction and Selection of Control Charts, and X-bar and R charts.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Institute of Quality & Reliability, on Tools & Techniques

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

Back to the Basics: Benchmarking for Improvement

Back to the Basics: Benchmarking for Improvement

Continuous improvement doesn’t happen in a vacuum. To raise the quality, reliability, and performance of their products and processes, organizations must look beyond their own four walls.
Benchmarking — the practice of studying others to improve your own performance — is a foundational tool for competitive advantage.

Whether comparing products, processes, or management systems, effective benchmarking helps organizations discover new ideas, set realistic goals, and accelerate improvement.

Let’s take a step back and explore the basics of benchmarking: what it is, how it works, and why it matters.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Carl S. Carlson Leave a Comment

FMEA Quality Objective 3: Interfaces

A picture is worth a thousand words. An interface is worth a thousand pictures. Ben Shneiderman

In this article, I will outline how to evaluate an individual Design FMEA (DFMEA) against the FMEA Quality Objective for Interfaces. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Inside FMEA Tagged With: FMEA Quality Objectives

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

Theory of Constraints

Theory of Constraints

A Tool for Project Selection and Continuous Improvement

Across industries and disciplines, one challenge remains constant: how to prioritize the right improvement projects to drive meaningful, measurable progress. Whether you work in continuous improvement, reliability, quality, or manufacturing engineering, you have more ideas and opportunities than time or resources to pursue them. This is where the Theory of Constraints (TOC) shines. Developed by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, TOC offers a focused methodology for identifying the best opportunities for improvement, allocating resources wisely, and sustaining continuous advancement.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Hemant Urdhwareshe Leave a Comment

SPC-1: Statistical Process Control Chart Selection, and Application Example on Excel

SPC-1: Statistical Process Control Chart Selection, and Application Example on Excel

Dear friends, Institute of Quality and Reliability (IQR) is happy to release this first video in our series on statistical process control charts. In the video, Hemant Urdhwareshe, Director of IQR and Fellow of ASQ explains criteria for selection of control charts, and has illustrated how to plot X-bar and Range chart using Microsoft Excel with an application example. Hemant has also explained briefly the interpretation rules to detect special causes. The video is little long but request viewers to watch it till end for best viewing experience.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Institute of Quality & Reliability, on Tools & Techniques

by Hemant Urdhwareshe Leave a Comment

Fractional Factorial Design with Center Point: Design and Analysis

Fractional Factorial Design with Center Point: Design and Analysis

Dear friends, we are happy to release this video on fractional factorial design. In this video, Hemant Urdhwareshe has illustrated how to create a five-factor resolution-V design in Minitab (version 17) with an example of a virtual catapult (thanks to sigmazone.com)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Institute of Quality & Reliability, on Tools & Techniques

by Larry George 1 Comment

Reliability Estimation Efficiency? Without Lifetime Data?

Reliability Estimation Efficiency? Without Lifetime Data?

What is the efficiency of your reliability estimators and failure forecasts? Compare naïve forecasts: guess, AFR, MTBF, or times series extrapolations such as ARIMA, GMDH, and AI, vs. forecasts based on reliability estimators. With grouped lifetime data, the Kaplan-Meier estimator is statistically efficient, under a condition often ignored! With lifetime data you could use maximum likelihood estimators like Weibull or Kaplan-Meier from (a sample of?) grouped lifetimes. Without lifetime data you could estimate reliability from population ships and returns counts from data required by GAAP! This article compares efficiency and cost of forecasts based on alternative data and estimators.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, Progress in Field Reliability?

by Hemant Urdhwareshe 1 Comment

Reliability Estimation with Kaplan-Meier Nonparametric Method

Reliability Estimation with Kaplan-Meier Nonparametric Method

Hello Friends! I am happy to release this video on Kaplan-Meier (KM) nonparametric method to estimate reliability. The KM method is used in situations when the data cannot be modelled using mathematical distributions such as Weibull, Lognormal etc. The KM method is popularly used in medical science to estimate survival probabilities of patients with diseases such as cancer, kidney diseases, etc.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Institute of Quality & Reliability, on Tools & Techniques

by Hemant Urdhwareshe Leave a Comment

Covid-19 RT-PCR Test, Confusion Matrix and International Travel

Covid-19 RT-PCR Test, Confusion Matrix and International Travel

Dear friends, This is Hemant Urdhwareshe! I am uploading this video, which is different from our other videos! In this video, I have explained the “Confusion Matrix” and related terms such as Sensitivity, Specificity, Accuracy with reference to RT-PCR Test to detect Covid-19 infection. I and my son were isolated for Covid-19 as I was detected Covid-19 positive before my return travel and then isolated for about a fortnight in Egypt! This video is a result of my experience and review of travel rules! I am sure you will find this interesting and thought-provoking!

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Institute of Quality & Reliability, on Tools & Techniques

by Carl S. Carlson Leave a Comment

FMEA Quality Objective 2: SCOPE

“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” – Yogi Berra

As summarized in the first article in this series, “New Series – The Quality of FMEAs,” each month, I will write an article focusing on one of the 14 FMEA Quality Objectives. The intent is to provide insights and application tips for evaluating how well an FMEA meets the quality objectives. By learning to apply FMEA quality objectives, you can help to ensure that product designs and manufacturing processes are safe and reliable. If you didn’t read the introductory article, now is a good time to read it, since it explains FMEA Quality Objectives, and how they are used to create high-quality FMEAs.

In this article, I will outline how to evaluate an individual FMEA against the FMEA Quality Objective for Scope. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Inside FMEA, on Tools & Techniques Tagged With: FMEA Quality Objectives

by Larry George Leave a Comment

What MTBF Do You Want?

What MTBF Do You Want?

Originally published in the ASQC Reliability Review, Vol. 15, No. 3, Sept. 1995 

This article shows reductio ad absurdum in action. Yes you can achieve any MTBF you want, by mixing products with Weibull life distributions, but you won’t want the consequences. The article also shows the absurdity of specifying MTBF, alone. 

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, Progress in Field Reliability?

by Hemant Urdhwareshe Leave a Comment

Sample Size and Power In Hypothesis Testing

Sample Size and Power In Hypothesis Testing

Concepts and Application with Minitab Software

Institute of Quality and Reliability is happy to release this video on Power and Sample Size in the context of hypothesis testing. The video also contains application examples of power and sample size calculation for one-sample z-test using Minitab software.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, Institute of Quality & Reliability, on Tools & Techniques

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

The Answer That’s Clear, Simple, and Wrong

The Answer That’s Clear, Simple, and Wrong

H.L. Mencken, the sharp-witted satirist and critic of early 20th-century American life, once wrote, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”1 Mencken, born in Baltimore in 1880, was known for his incisive critiques of societal norms and his skepticism of simplistic solutions to complex issues. 

Mencken’s wisdom applies to both everyday life and technical fields. His insights are particularly relevant in the engineering, manufacturing, and reliability disciplines, where the temptation to seek easy answers can lead to costly errors. We’ll start with a relatable everyday example before exploring documented cases in engineering and manufacturing that demonstrate the pitfalls of oversimplified solutions.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Hemant Urdhwareshe Leave a Comment

Confidence Intervals (Part 3) for Proportion and Standard Deviation

Dear friends, We are happy to release this third video in our series on Confidence Intervals! In this video, Hemant Urdhwareshe has explained how to determine confidence intervals for population proportion and standard deviation with day-today application examples! Hemant has also illustrated use of templates for quick calculation!

Links to other related videos:

Confidence Interval (Part-1) for Mean (Sigma Known)

Confidence Interval (Part-2) for Mean (Sigma unknown)

Chi-square Distribution

Chi-square Test of One Variance

Filed Under: Articles, Institute of Quality & Reliability, on Tools & Techniques

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • …
  • 46
  • Next Page »

Join Accendo

Receive information and updates about articles and many other resources offered by Accendo Reliability by becoming a member.

It’s free and only takes a minute.

Join Today

Recent Articles

  • Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) – More Than Just a Diagram
  • A Life Data Analysis Challenge
  • Duty Cycle in Depth
  • Project Documents: Obviously Wrong or Patently Acceptable
  • Reliability Growth Cause Analysis Tutorial 

© 2025 FMS Reliability · Privacy Policy · Terms of Service · Cookies Policy

Book the Course with John
  Ask a question or send along a comment. Please login to view and use the contact form.
This site uses cookies to give you a better experience, analyze site traffic, and gain insight to products or offers that may interest you. By continuing, you consent to the use of cookies. Learn how we use cookies, how they work, and how to set your browser preferences by reading our Cookies Policy.