Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Whether by design or by accident some of us become reliability engineers. Making a career in reliability engineering relies on your ability to make a difference and to add value. Being successful as a reliability engineer, while creating reliable products, permits continuation and growth as a reliability professional.
In an ideal world, our products and equipment will just work. They would not fail and would not require warranty claims, product returns, or repair.
Unfortunately, we make design mistakes, assembly errors, incur damage, or simply fail. The desired balance for most businesses is the cost of returns will not outweigh the profit of sales.
With any product development, there is a risk the features (benefit) come along with inherent dangers (risk). For example, a desktop computer includes the need for electrical power. Done improperly a person exposed to wall current and voltage could be seriously harmed. While unlikely the risk exists. [Read more…]
One approach for reliability improvement is to find the weaknesses or faults, then fix them.
This is best done before shipping to the customer.
You may hear this called the Test, Analyze, and Fix Method (TAAF). Or, you may have heard of it called a Reliability Growth Test program (RGT). Either way, the essence is evaluating prototypes to find specific faults. [Read more…]
Being the reliability engineer on a project doesn’t have to be a lonely assignment.
Nearly everyone on the team shares the same goal. That of creating a reliable product or maintaining equipment availability.
Other may be electrical or mechanical engineers, technicians, procurement or some other part of the organization, yet they all have something to contribute to improving reliability.
Sometimes you have to find the reliability-minded individuals – to assist when gathering information – to identify potential weaknesses – to provide support for a reliability task – to encourage others to fully consider reliability with each decision [Read more…]
Testing a new design is expensive and takes time to accomplish. During the design, process engineers make assumptions across many decisions. Unknown interactions and unanticipated events may lead to product failure.
Finding design weaknesses early in the design process permits the team to address and correct problems. [Read more…]
How do you find, encourage and develop reliability professionals across your organization? We all face the challenge of creating a culture of reliability within an organization at some point in our careers.
Do so alone is nearly impossible.
You need support. You need more hands and minds that can spot reliability opportunities. You need to be in dozens of conversations per hour across the organization.
This is difficult for one person to accomplish.
Maria Popova recently wrote about the work of James T. Mangan and his book You Can Do Anything!
, published in 1936. In particular she focused on one section titled 14 Ways to Acquire Knowledge
The article is about learning anything, which had me thinking about how to learn reliability engineering. So, without apology let’s explore 14 ways to learn about reliability engineering. [Read more…]
In Chapter 8 of The Basics of FMEA by Robin E. McDermott, et. al. discusses the ten steps for an FMEA. I find it to be an excellent summary for describing and conducting a failure mode and effect analysis.
Therefore based on the work of McDermott and others, plus my own experience here are the ten steps with my descriptions. [Read more…]
One of best features about working in reliability engineering is everything fails, eventually. This fact provides a bit of career stability.
Another aspect I enjoy is the concepts and approaches that create the foundation for reliability engineering knowledge do not change very much over time. The basics of reliability engineering are the same as when the earliest engineers began design structures and products.
One of the most basic skills needed for the CRE exam is the ability to correctly read the Standard Normal Table.
Writing this short how-to article would be really easy if there were only one way to create the table. There isn’t. It seems every author has to create a unique way to tabulate the values. [Read more…]
It seems the forces of nature are working against our ideas.
I recall being frustrated as a child playing in the sandbox. I wanted to create a ramp of sand to race my cars down. No matter how much I pushed and patted the dry sand succumbed to some unseen force and did not hold the desired shape.
In business, we sometimes experience the same frustration. It’s not gravity.
Instead, we are facing organizational inertia.
An effective product reliability process requires a strong team, at every level.
The team of employees within an organization that participate and impact product reliability is a vast and widespread group of people. They include members of the design team, design managers, quality and reliability engineers and managers, procurement engineers and managers, warranty managers, failure analysis specialists, members of the marketing and sales staff, members of the finance and manufacturing teams, and field service and call center staffs. [Read more…]
Most agree that improving products or process reliability is a good thing. It’s good for customers, factories, and our business.
And, sometimes it’s difficult to answer the question,
What is the value of that reliability activity?
Years ago my boss asked me what value I provided the organization. Working as a reliability professional, I thought that my value was obvious. He asked me to show the value.
It was harder than I thought.
