Extend Your FMEA Process with Mechanisms

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.

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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.

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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…]

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…]

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…]

[Note: I wrote and published this article in August 2016, almost 10 years ago. The overall house hasn’t failed yet some windows leak when it’s raining (replaced), the water heater and furnace have both failed (replaced, repaired), and we are enjoying the house as our home. And, while I do get out for walks, I do not play Pokémon Go anymore.]

Seriously, while out walking, listening to a podcast, and playing Pokémon Go, I found an open house to view. A week later our offer was accepted, and next week we close.

I  would not have been out walking that Sunday afternoon if not out playing Pokémon Go.

Glad there are no dangerous cliffs nearby. [Read more…]

A Few Simple Ideas to Improve Your Reliability Program

Spending too much on reliability and not getting the results you expect? Just getting started and not sure where to focus your reliability program? Or, just looking for ways to improve your program?

There is not one way to build an effective reliability program. The variations in industries, expectations, technology, and the many constraints shape each program. Here are three suggestions you can apply to any program at any time. These are not quick-fix solutions, nor will you see immediate results, yet each will significantly improve your reliability program and help you achieve the results you and your customers expect. [Read more…]