Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A common reliability test involves ‘baking’ a few units.
Various standards list temperature, duration, and sample size requirements.
When the units survive the test, meaning there are no failures, what does that mean?
How do you interpret a system or component life test using high temperature?
Do the results suggest your product is reliable? Maybe it is maybe it isn’t.
Let’s examine one way to design and interpret high-temperature testing. [Read more…]
Here’s a question for you: Do you ask your suppliers the right questions concerning reliability?
Probably not.
If you are getting the right information from your suppliers, then you would enjoy few supplier related field issues, or as little downtime or low warranty costs.
Asking the right set of questions will help you gain the understanding you need to improve your reliability performance. [Read more…]
Benchmarking is the systematic process of observation and analysis.
The evaluation of a project, method or process best practices as performed by recognized industry leader may reveal improvement opportunities for your organization.
Benchmarking may focus on diverse business processes and with both internal and external subjects.
The intent is to understand what makes the subject’s process work well.
Understanding a system that operates well may reveal the elements in your process that may benefit with a change.
Keep in mind that not all best practice processes may apply to your specific situation. (Lapide, 2005) [Read more…]
A maxim of business management is to measure what is important.
The focus on aligning metrics, rewards, and incentives is not a new concept. Many businesses create target focused incentives with the expectation it will assist achieving those important business goals.
In many cases, simply monitoring a metric improve the team’s ability to achieve a specific goal.
In some cases, though, achieving the goal and associated incentive has an associated negative impact on the business.
If you offer a bonus for a short-term behavior or goal and offer nothing to balance with the long-term impact.
Your incentive may actually damage your business in the long term. [Read more…]
You have carefully crafted a detailed reliability goal including function, environment, probability, and duration, plus apportioned it to critical supplied subsystems and components. Your vendor decides to use MTBF instead.
What can you do? What should you do?
Initially, the CRE Prep blog aimed at providing refresher material for those preparing for the ASQ CRE exam.
In discussions with readers, it has become clear to me that many new to reliability engineering have found the series of articles useful.
That is should not be surprising since many of the tutorials are introductory and practical.
The problem those new to the field have is related with where to start.
There is a lot of information related to reliability engineering.
From defining reliability to working with teams to Weibull analysis, there is a lot to know. [Read more…]
Prototypes are precious items. A vendor sample or beta version of factory parts may provide necessary insights.
They are not real though.
The prototypes and samples we hold, admire, examine and test are just a representation of the final product or system.
It is extremely rare we will learn exactly what we need to know with these few items. [Read more…]
Recently one of the CRE Preparation course students sat for the ASQ CRE exam at one of the Prometrics testing centers.
She passed – which is great, and she knew this as she received grading immediately after finishing the exam.
That is a new and nice feature. What we do not know if what happens if you do not pass.
Do you get feedback in a meaningful manner?
Here are a few other notes on the exam experience Raye reported. [Read more…]
One of my favorite things to do when visiting a new company, it at lunch or during a break, ask:
“Any major disasters that impacted reliability?”
Typically, there are three stories that start with, “Remember the… “, or, “One time…”
It seems every organization has legendary stories in the organizational memory. [Read more…]
Image that. Customers say one thing and expect something else.
A customer may provide a detailed and complete reliability specification, then, 6 months into using the product complain it is not reliable enough. [Read more…]
On page 6 of Statistics for Experimenters, Box, and Hunter suggest a scientist could conduct an investigation without statistics.
Whereas, a statistician could not do so without scientific knowledge.
The text’s discussion quickly expands on the benefits to a scientist when they do employ statistical thinking and tools.
Design of Experiments, DOE, is a set of statistical tools that allow an investigator to efficiently examine multiple factors and their associated influence on results.
DOE allows us to be better investigators. [Read more…]
We have data. Often, an abundance of data concerning equipment failures. Failures per month or MTBF-type measures do not reveal sufficient insights to understand the pattern of failures.
A good plot reveals the data’s story.
Repairable system data is what is called by statisticians a renewal process.
The repair activity may restore the system to as good as new. Sometimes, the repair pretty much leaves the system in a state similar to just before the repair.
What happens most often, though, is the chance of system failure changes after each repair activity.
A simple plot can help us see what is happening. [Read more…]
Warranty is a part of doing business. Warranty management is not just the terms listed on the box.
Understanding the entire warranty process, along with your options, permits you to manage your warranty, rather than the other way around.
This is a short overview.
Pieces of a warranty program occur well before the first product ships and may affect the company bottom line for years after you ship your last product.
Brand promise, marketing, finance, customer service are not common areas for a reliability engineer.
Yet, the impact of product failures tends to dominant warranty expenses.
Therefore understanding the many elements around warranty management is essential for any reliability engineer. [Read more…]
