Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Learning the basics of reliability engineering is where we all start. Mastering the range of skills and techniques is a never-ending quest.
Improving, maintaining, and expanding your reliability engineering professional skills takes many forms. There are plenty of options and sources to support your education, yet are you getting enough of the right material? [Read more…]
In asset-intensive industries, workforce management is just as critical as the physical assets themselves. No matter how advanced an organization’s maintenance strategies, asset monitoring systems, or predictive technologies are, the success of asset management depends on the people who operate, maintain, and optimize those assets.
Workforce management in relation to asset management is about ensuring that the right people, with the right skills, are in the right place at the right time to keep assets running efficiently and reliably. A well-managed workforce leads to higher productivity, lower costs, improved safety, and extended asset lifespan.
[Read more…]
Capacitors are likely the most common electronic component. They have many uses, many shapes, sizes, and constructions. Yet, just because they are common and rather inexpensive, they can fail. Sometimes a capacitor failure is completely unnoticed; other times it can be catastrophic.
Let’s explore common types of capacitors, MLCC and Electrolytic, their basic construction, and how they may fail. Understanding these components will assist you in designing for reliability and failure analysis activities.
One of the issues I’ve had with failure modes and effects analysis is the focus on failure modes.
The symptoms that the customer or end user will experience are important. If a customer detects that the product has failed, that is a failure. The FMEA process does help us to identify and focus on the important elements of a design that improve the product reliability. That is all good.
The issue is that the FMEA process doesn’t go far enough to really aid the team in focusing on what action to take when addressing a failure mode. The process does include the discussion of the causes of the failure mode. The causes are often the team members’ educated opinions on what is likely to cause the failure mode. Often the description of a cause is a failed part, faulty code, or faulty assembly.
Generally, the discussion of causes is vague.
To make informed decisions, you need information.
To form conclusions, you need evidence and a touch of logic.
To discover patterns, you need data.
In each of these cases, and others, we often start with data. The data we have on hand, or can quickly gather.
We organize data into tables, summarize data into reports, display them in dashboards, and analyze the results to inform decisions. [Read more…]
Having the technical and business skills is not sufficient to be a good reliability engineer.
You must also work with other people. With your peers, across the management team, with suppliers, contractors, and customers.
The ability to work well with others is often complex and situational. Being aware of a few basic skills will allow you to learn and improve. Prette and Prette define social competence as the social skills:
that meet the different inter-personal demands in the workplace in order to achieve the goals, preserve the well-being of the staff and respect the rights of each other.
A. Del Prette e Z. A. P. Del Prette, Psicologia das relações interpessoais: vivências para o trabalho em grupo, Vozes, Petrópolis, 2001.
Did you know that you do not need to be a manager to be a leader. And, many managers are not very good leaders. What does it take to manage and/or lead a reliability improvement effort in an organization. If your organization already produces very reliable products, how do you keep it that way? Likewise, if you recognize the reliability performance could be better, what should you do.
Let’s talk about the difference between management and leadership, and how you can play an effective role as both a manager and a leader focused on improving reliability outcomes. Where to start, how to build a team, and how to get results.
Knowing how to estimate sample size or create a Weibull plot is not enough today.
Just having technical skills, while essential, is not sufficient.
Having a master of business administration (MBA) may be helpful, and it is not required; knowing the warranty and brand cost per failure is essential.
You also need to know which analysis to conduct and how it fits into the larger program and organization, plus how it impacts your customers. You also need to understand the business side of your work. [Read more…]
The fundamental technical skills, as I see it, have to include statistics and root cause analysis skills. This skill set is one of three broad areas introduced in the article, What Makes the Best Reliability Engineer?
I would say these are the minimum technical skills for a good reliability engineer. Able to calculate sample size requirements, understand a dataset, and correctly determine the root causes of a failure. [Read more…]
Complex systems, such as automobiles, contain many moving parts that can lead to failure from a variety of causes and failure modes. AI can utilize system data recorded over time to automatically alert us to imminent failure and identify root causes.
Decision Trees are a relatively simple and popular AI tool, that can quickly learn and assess key variables and their interactions which contribute to an outcome such as system failure. They are fast to create, easy to interpret and can help us identify failure modes.
In this webinar, we will look at the basics of decision tree modelling and consider a simple demonstration of its application to assess imminent failure in automobiles. [Read more…]
Many products include items designed and manufactured by another company. Few is any make their own screws or capacitors found in their product. We rely on our suppliers to create items we can incorporate into our product offerings.
When a supplied item fails, say a power supply, the customer notices the product is not working, your product, not necessarily the faulty power supply. Your brand takes the hit and pays the price of the failure.
Let’s explore how to work with suppliers to ensure the supplied items will meet or exceed your reliability expectations. It’s not as simple as requiring a set of tests or warranty contracts; it is the relationship you build with the supplier and understanding the supplier’s reliability, maturity, and capability.
We establish reliability goals and measure reliability performance.
They are not the same thing. Goals and measures, while related, are not the same nor serve the same purpose. [Read more…]
Just when I thought we had experienced every possible MTBF definition confusion, here’s another.
This one is courtesy of the thread concerning the impact on reliability when adding redundancy to a system. [Read more…]
A product warranty is a form of guarantee that if the product doesn’t work, it will be repaired or replaced. Yet, is this just marketing or is it smart business? Warranties are seemingly automatic with the purchase of an item, yet why do so many stores offer an ‘extended warranty’?
Let’s explore what warranties are and are not, plus why they even exist. How are the terms of a warranty set, and by whom? Also, analyzing warranty data is one way to learn how well a product is doing in the field.
In a Q&A forum, the response to a question concerning failure rate and repair times for a redundant system demonstrated yet another person confusing MTBF with something it is not.
The responder to the question mentioned that the reference to repair time implied the need for MTBF as a metric. Then went on to describe MTBF as the duration of repair time, which should not change given a redundant system over a non-redundant system. [Read more…]
