Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
If you are a reliability engineer – chances are you have done a Weibull plot. You take something like failure data, put it into a piece of software, and presto! [Read more…]
If we have even a moderately complex product, we often need to break up our design team into smaller groups. Perhaps electronic, mechanical and hydraulic teams. Perhaps teams for specific functional components. And these teams need to work at least partially independently. So what do we do if we have a system reliability goal? What goals do we pass on to our smaller teams? This is where reliability allocation comes into play. Reliability allocation is often portrayed as a very complex, very involved and extremely exhaustive process. It should never be! In fact – the more exhaustive you make, the less likely it is to work.
If you want to learn more about a straightforward approach to reliability allocation – read this!
Chris discusses … what you want. Pretty broad I know. But there are things we really want – things we dedicate our time, effort and attention to. And then there are things we say we want. And the human brain is actually specifically structure to pick up on different cues to work out if you are really interested in something (or not). So we can pretty easily work out if you say you want something – but don’t really want it to the extent you want other things. Why does this relate to reliability engineering? Click here to learn more.
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Chris discusses ‘rules’ – rules we need to apply and rules we must bend. Rules can range from traditional practices and procedures through to the laws of nature. But we as reliability engineers need to know which of these rules we must adhere to, and which are our duty to try and bend. Want to learn more? Listen to this podcast!
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Chris discusses ‘reliability security blankets.’ You know what security blankets are – the things that parents offer young children to make them feel safe and comfortable. Not because these blankets actually offer warmth, comfort or safety – but rather because the children associate feelings of warmth and safety with that object because it is ‘always there’ when they are at home or go to be. A reliability security blanket does the same thing – it calms the leaders, managers, bosses, and directors of an organization. But – that is it! There is no reliability to be found. Want to learn more? Listen to this podcast!
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Having a reliability target for your product is excellent. But how does that help all the little design teams, who make their own decisions on all the different parts of your system?
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Chris discusses reliability engineering report writing (yuck). Pretty boring topic. But not nearly as boring as some of the reliability engineering reports. I will (try to) make this as entertaining a podcast as possible. And I will explain the golden rule of engineering report writing – make it a ‘reverse thriller.’ Keen to learn more? Then please listen!
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Chris talks about what ‘profitability’ is … and it is not ‘profit today.’ Why is this distinction important? Because focusing on profitability takes care of all of your future ‘profits today.’ But it does not work the other way around. There are plenty of contemporary examples about how we can get this wrong – think Boeing and the ‘mess’ it is currently in. Want to learn more? Please listen here!
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As we make things to be more and more reliable, it gets harder and harder to make them fail in reliability tests. On the one hand – that’s great. On the other hand – that sucks if we want to use testing to help measure reliability. So if we are focused on measuring reliability through testing, we need to make our product or system fail in test conditions (without making it less reliable) but make sure these test conditions can somehow be translated back to how customers are going to use it. This is where accelerated testing comes in. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss Markov Chain modeling. Where we model transitioning from one state to another – which is often used for availability. How and when do I use it? Does it work in today’s reliability applications? Listen here to learn more.
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Chris and Fred discuss the Reliability Management Tutorial that Chris and Carl Carlson (another Accendo contributor) will be delivering at the Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS) in Palm Springs later this month. This tutorial can contribute to you getting a certificate as well if you are attending. Like to learn more? Listen here.
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Chris and Fred discuss data analysis … specifically the first question we ask before we help someone with their data analysis project. Chris always asks – what is the decision that this data analysis will support? And Fred always asks – where did this data come from? The reason these questions are important is that you need to know what information you need before you construct an analysis to get that information. And you need to be confident in the results. A single data set can potentially create multiple information sets. And this depends on how you construct the analysis. Which based on the decision. Listen to this podcast if you would like to learn more.
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Chris and Fred discuss reliability leadership. What is reliability leadership? Writing a book? Putting together a few slides? The first thing to know is that there is a difference between a reliability manager and a reliability leader. A reliability manager will tend to oversee practices and processes that others have identified or put together. Reliability leaders come up with the rationale, the motivation, the linking with business outcomes and everything else that creates or sustains organizational change. You can have the ‘best’ reliability engineers – but without reliability leadership, you won’t make reliable products. Want to learn more? Listen to this podcast.
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Chris and Fred discuss the ‘gist’ of reliability. Fred was recently asked to be part of a panel to a number ‘hardware startups’ and was asked … what is the ‘gist’ of reliability? We try and answer that question as simply as possible in this podcast. The thing is … reliability will happen. Ignoring it doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Reliability is an outcome of your decisions and the design choices you make. The harder you work on it, the closer reliability will be to what you expect. So do you want to learn what the ‘gist’ of reliability is? Well, listen to this podcast.
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Chris and Fred discuss the concept of an ‘outlier.’ Depending on the definition, an outlier is something that is different, non-representative or somehow separate from the ‘main body’ of something. We often use the term ‘outlier’ when it comes to statistical analysis of something – specifically when we see something that is beyond what we expect to see. So what do we do with ‘outliers’ … particularly when it comes to reliability analysis? It may be tempting to exclude them (particularly if it makes the outcome of your analysis ‘better’!). We have not seen the exclusion of ‘outliers’ have a happy ending when it comes to reliability. Would you like to learn more? Listen to this podcast!
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