Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
I often start teaching my reliability engineering courses … by focusing on other reliability engineering courses. Why? Because they exemplify what is wrong with how most ‘reliability experts’ go about convincing others to take reliability seriously.
A typical reliability engineering course will start with images of disaster. A Chernobyl here. A Fukushima there. A crashed airplane. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Lots of other atrocities that happen when we don’t do reliability engineering properly.
I (like most of us) try to keep learning about stuff. And this includes (on occasion) listening to guys like Simon Sinek who has made a name for himself as an inspirational speaker and author. I learn a lot from some of his stuff. Most people like Simon are skilled at simplifying fundamentally ‘good’ ideas and principles into really simple messages that are easy to break through our sometimes cluttered brains.
Chris and Fred discuss this thing called ‘Wright’s Law’ which is a really fascinating way of describing how things improve as we create more of them. And why is this relevant for reliability engineering? Does ‘reliability growth’ ring a bell?
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Chris and Fred discuss how important maintenance culture is – especially when it comes to safety-critical systems. Like ‘cable cars’ used to transport people up ski slopes. But unfortunately (like the recent accident that occurred in Italy that resulted in 14 deaths) toxic maintenance culture can lead to disastrous consequences. And this tends to happen across the world on a regular basis. Why does this happen?
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We’ve all been ‘there.’ Watching the ‘mechanical’ design team lead go through 378 PowerPoint slides of suffocating technical content, pixelated iPhone pictures of bearing housings, and lists of ‘open’ items in fonts that are too small. There are ‘senior’ engineers wheeled in to ‘review’ but instead nod knowingly and ask sporadic questions about something they once designed ‘back in the day.’ And the chairperson will often ask our ‘mechanical’ design team lead if they are ‘on track.’
Chris and Fred discuss what ‘distribution parameters’ mean when it comes to random processes. Specifically failure random processes. This is an interesting podcast in response to a question from one of our listeners – which are podcasts we love!
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At the 2019 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, I was involved in a discussion with US Department of Defense (DoD) reliability engineering teams and industry representatives. And on the agenda was a review of an emerging document called the ‘Reliability and Maintainability Engineering Management Body of Knowledge.’ Let’s call this the ‘DoD RAM BOK’ for short.
I only had access to this document’s quick reference guide, and it suggests that the DoD RAM BOK describes what reliability engineering activities need to happen from ‘concept’ through to ‘operations’ for a typical military capability being introduced into service.
Chris and Fred discuss the different words we often use (and misuse) in reliability engineering. ‘Reliability’ has been used for hundreds of years to describe different concepts of ruggedness, robustness, strength, timeliness, trustworthiness and so on. But – reliability has a specific definition within reliability engineering. There are plenty of other examples of how words we use in reliability engineering can have multiple meanings – even when we think they don’t!
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I was having a lunch meeting with a project manager, and the topic of outsourcing came up. Specifically, outsourcing the manufacture of a particular machine that would form part of a larger vehicle system. I asked him why he was doing this, particularly when for many years the predecessor to this machine was very successfully manufactured in-house. His answer was simple.
It was to transfer risk to a supplier. [Read more…]
We all know what the ‘root cause’ is … right? It is the ‘thing’ that caused something bad to happen. The problem is the definition of ‘root cause’ has been abused, misconstrued, re-written, misinterpreted, and all sorts of other things that erode from what it is supposed to be. And by that, I mean it has to be something that we can do something about (and make better). [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss accelerated testing – and how we come up with acceleration factors. Accelerated testing is great! It allows us to compress an entire lifecycle into a short test duration for us to quickly understand the reliability characteristics of our system … ONLY if we know what we are doing. Keen to learn more?
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There are plenty of reasons for renewable energy to become increasingly important. These reasons start with climate change and end with our unmistakably finite amount of fossil fuels buried in our fragile planet. One of the early criticisms of renewable energy was that it wasn’t cheap. Sure – the energy sources such as sunlight, wind and flowing water are inherently renewable, but the costs to manufacture and maintain all the equipment that extracts energy from these resources can be very high. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss what it means to focus on ‘effort’ instead of ‘outcomes.’ We often think we focus on outcomes only … but how many people ‘get by’ simply by being ‘seen’ around the office, looking busy when there, and otherwise being friendly to everyone? They always volunteer to be part of a team, do some of the ‘less glamorous’ tasks, and otherwise be ‘part of something.’ But is this person actually valuable? (… harsh as the question sounds).
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Steve Tengler from Forbes Magazine recently wrote about how Audi was improving the reliability and quality of its cars … by helping its suppliers. And while I wished he had a little more robustness behind his conclusions, he reinforced just how important it is to focus on who makes your products and not just what they make. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discussing the 3 perspectives of Fault Tree Analysis or FTA. What … there are 3 perspectives? … what are perspectives when it comes to FTA?
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