Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Because the people that make them lie.
Not ‘obvious’ lying where lightbulb manufacturers calculate one reliability number and deliberately choose to put another number on their lightbulb packaging. But ‘insidious’ lying where they deliberately choose to measure the wrong thing to get a better number.
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Chris and Fred discuss how reliability and quality is destroyed by organizations that like to have a ‘razor’ split between design and manufacturing teams. Why?
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Chris and Fred discuss how we can go about calculating equipment reliability … when you only have a small amount of information. Help!
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Chris and Fred use the safe return of the Boeing Starliner … without the crew! What does this tell us about its safety and reliability?
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Chris and Fred discuss the issues we often have with ‘habits.’ Habits can be good for us. But ‘bad habits’ are just that. Ever heard the excuse ‘but that’s the way we have always done it?’
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Every industry has its own way of characterizing reliability metrics. For example, the ball bearing industry uses the metric ‘B_10’ to represent the time by which they expect 10 % of all ball bearings of a specific type to fail. Electronic component manufacturers use the term ‘Failures in Time’ of ‘FITs’ to describe the reliability of their products. But what is a FIT? And how can you use it to measure reliability? Did you know that many electronic manufacturers advertise ‘FIT values’ that imply a mean time to failure of over 1 000 years? If you are involved in electronic component reliability, then join us for this webinar!
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Chris and Fred discuss reliability engineering … and vacations/holidays! … how are we going to make this topic relevant …
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Chris and Fred discuss how to calculate ‘confidence’ and other things regarding probability and statistics … particularly as it applies to reliability!
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And the answer is not ‘the letter C.’ A FMEA is a group activity that follows a logical (and time-proven) structure to effectively ‘brainstorm’ what are called ‘corrective actions’ for existing or likely problems in design and manufacture of products. Production teams that comprise designers, engineers, technicians and manufacturers typically have a wealth of existing knowledge and understanding of the product being developed. But some people will tell you that an FMECA is not an FMEA. And many government agencies, in particular, demand FMECAs over FMEAs. Interested to understand the difference (if any) between FMEAs and FMECAs? … and How can you make an FMECA work for you? Join us at this webinar!
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Chris and Fred discuss the ability to get ‘data sets’ to practice reliability analysis on! … sounds like a party …
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Chris and Fred discuss how long stuff lasts! … or how long something should last! … how do you ‘know’ what it should be?
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Chris and Fred discuss how reliability can sometimes be linked to politics (… at least in some way). Is this an experience you share?
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There might not ever be a better demonstration of the saying that …
… a fish rots from it’s head.
Boeing is responsible for the half-baked Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) that was forced into its new 737 Max aircraft. This involved a decidedly awful attempt to convince the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that there was no need to subject said aircraft through all the checks and balances that you need to go through if it is in fact a brand-new and different type of plane. Which it was. This resulted in the deaths of 346 passengers and crew (along with plenty of claims that it was pilot error). And just to be clear, Boeing has since admitted that it’s employees defrauded the FAA during the original certification process – an admission it was not required to make if it was able to complete a three-year period of increased monitoring and reporting. Which it could not.
[Read more…]Chris and Fred discuss how to make a good impression when interviewing for a reliability engineering position. How do you prepare?
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What is a ‘root cause’ of failure? It is something that you did (or didn’t) do that ultimately resulted in failure. It’s not corrosion (that’s a physical process that follows the laws of nature that you can’t change). It’s not a porous seal that allows moisture to enter your product to cause corrosion (that’s a defect or fault that you or your team made happen). Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is the process where we systematically work out what things we did or didn’t do that allowed failure to occur, and Fault Trees are often very helpful in finding this root causes. If you want to learn more about RCA or how fault trees can help RCA, join us for this webinar.
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