Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Remember how we were told as kids in school that we had to study hard to get into college or university? There was that ongoing, implied threat that not getting into university or college would ruin our career. Or at least, be very bad.
It turns out it may not be that bad after all. For example, over half of Apple’s employees don’t have 4-year degrees. Why? [Read more…]
Every organization needs to be able to explain ‘why’ it is here. In fact, an organization’s ‘why’ is . Check out Simon Sinek. One of his favourite phrases is that ‘people don’t buy what you do – they buy why you do it.’
People buy Apple products because of they enjoy how they interface with devices that are part of a bigger and seamless ecosystem. All their competitors try to emulate this. Amazon is all about customer experience. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss what warranty and reliability mean for each other. They sounds like very related topics or ideas. But are they? Listen to this podcast to learn more.
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Chris and Fred discuss what the idea of ‘6 sigma’ means for reliability. What is ‘6 sigma?’ Is it a buzzword? There are lots of different ideas on what ‘6 sigma’ is. We are always on the look out for amazing new things that are going to help us do reliability stuff. Want to learn more? Listen to this podcast.
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We all know that all you need to work out how many spare parts you need is to put some numbers into a computer, perhaps throw in a ‘confidence’ level as well, and use the number that the computer spits back out at you. Right? [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss the roles assumption play in reliability. Assumptions can be very useful … or very dangerous. Why? Because assumptions are information. If they are based on nothing, then assumptions become misinformation. Which means you make the wrong decision. Listen to this podcast to learn more!
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Chris and Fred discuss how we confirm the reliability of something we are making. Or maintaining. Or managing. This is in response to someone raising a question regarding reliability allocation – based on an Accendo webinar. And the question was all about working out how to test that we are on track to meet goals allocated to subsystems and components. So what do we do? Well listen to this podcast!
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Chris and Fred discuss ‘why’ leadership. Not why leadership is important (we know it is). But the sort of leadership that focuses on the ‘why’ of an organization or group of people. ‘Why’ people who work at these organizations get out of bed in the morning. ‘Why’ customers purchase products or services from an organization. And if we get the ‘why’ right … everything becomes a lot easier. Especially reliability.
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Chris and Fred discuss ‘Problem #5.’ What is problem #5? Well … technically it isn’t a problem at all. Which is what we want to be doing as reliability engineers. Preventing problems from occurring. Most people look at reliability engineers as (perhaps at best) addressing field failures or failures in the hands of the customers. But reliability engineering is much more valuable than that. Reliability engineering prevents you from not meeting budget or not achieving scheduled milestones. In fact … field failures (which are what we call ‘Problem #1’) are incidental to good reliability engineering. Want to learn more?
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This is the fourth in our webinar series, ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ We have examined how to turn data points (like the different failure points of devices under test) into something simple, useful, and sometimes beautiful! This is something that commercial software can’t do. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss what performance actually means. When it comes to reliability engineering … is this simply having fewer failures? NO! There is plenty more to reliability engineering than simply taking a ‘thing’ and simply making it work for longer. How can reliability engineering make more appealing, more functional, and less expensive products? Listen to this podcast for more!
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Chris and Fred discuss how we use standards for reliability engineering, safety, and other similar fields. Standards have a place in everything we do. But issues come when we stop thinking about the thing we are creating and rely on the standards to guide really important decisions. Why is this silly? Listen to the podcast!
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This is the third in our webinar series ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ The first webinar showed what it means to turn reliability data into something a decision-maker can use. Not a chart. Not a graph. Not a ‘p’ value. Not anything else that you find in a textbook but isn’t useful. Last month’s webinar talked about how the best way to do this is to use computers … but in an easy way! And we talked about creating a ‘posse’ of possible ‘ways’ to explain the data we see. And this webinar is about how we use this thing called Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulation (MCMC) to create this ‘posse.’ And the ‘posse’ isn’t random … it is based on the ‘likelihood’ of each one being the correct one, which is how MCMC works. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss what a ‘body of knowledge’ or ‘BOK’ should do? And by this we mean a document or book that outlines the key ideas or things you should know for doing ‘something’ … like reliability. There are many textbooks which are (let’s face it) not helpful because they are ‘too technical’ – and not useful for the majority of reliability decisions. But we can go too far the other way as well and make things too simple – so we just plug and play tools. Without knowing what each tool does. Sound familiar? Listen to this podcast!
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Chris and Fred discuss the urge for (us) reliability engineers to rush to use a tool – and not understand what that tool does, how it works, or even if it answers the question you are trying to answer. Why is this? We sometimes (always) like solving problems. But in our rush to solve a problem … do we solve the right problem? Do we create more problems? What’s a ‘problem?’ Sound familiar or scary? Listen to this podcast.
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