Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Fred and Thomas sat down at RAMS 2017 to talk about his work as a reliability engineer (actually a quality engineer) and a range of reliablity topics.
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In a recent Seth Godin blog, Counting beans he talks about the eventual costs of little compromises. The immediate benefit may be celebration worthy, yet
But overlooked are the unknown costs over time, the erosion in brand, the loss in quality, the subtraction from something that took years to add up.
This certainly applies to reliability as well. Deferring maintenance just one more month, addressing one more software bug can be done after shipping, and similar small shifts erode reliability of your system. [Read more…]
Customers of your product would like the particular one they have to work. To work over time.
If a product meets the customer’s expectation by working as long or longer than they expected it to do so, then they may consider your product reliable.
We use reliability goals to discuss the customer’s reliability expectations. It is the establishment of requirements that converts the customer expectations to development and production obligations. [Read more…]
For this milestone episode (200th show) Fred asked the co-host consultants how they got started in consulting.
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Fred and Phil sat down to talk about MTBF, RAMS, and the work he does in the reliability world.
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Organizations around the world are recognizing the value of reliability engineering. Or, they are realizing that creating a durable product that delights the customer is good for business.
Another contributor to the interest in reliable products is the news of recalls. One recall not only distrupts the normal course of business, it may alter the future of the company. It may cause the collapse of the organization. Some do better than others, yet a major, in the news, recall is something to avoid. Creating a reliable product helps.
So you made it past the initial round of interview and have been called back to talk to the senior folks. As with any job interview, being prepared helps you present your best self. Understanding the business drivers motivating an interest in reliablity is essential for your preperation. This is not how to prepare an accelerated test plan type question, rather it is about how the results of an ALT will provide relevant value to the organization. [Read more…]
We are rather good at being surprised when setting expectations for the future. This is the essence of risk. The difference between what we expect to occur or would like to occur, and what does occur.
The definition of risk in ISO 9000:2015 and ISO 31000 include the phrase “ effect of uncertainty”. Let’s remove some of the uncertainty around the term uncertainty in the context of risk and risk management. [Read more…]
Fred and Mohammad sat down at RAMS 2017 to talk about the conference and his work in the field of reliability.
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In a customer’s mind, the product works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t work as expected it has failed. This may or may not be a reliability problem.
A customer or someone using your product brings a set of expectations to the experience. The range of expectations may range from very little to very high functioning, value production, and durability.
Failures are defined by customers.
In part, this is the functional capability, the operating within specifications, and the durability. The customer’s definition of reliability may or may not follow the design specifications.
It is the comparison of what should happen to what does happen. [Read more…]
Did you know that hot air doesn’t rise when there is no or very little gravity?
The electronics used to steer an oil exploration drill head 5 miles deep in the earth experiences 200°C sulfuric acid immersion along with continuous 50,000G shocks.
I used to think the environment under the hood a car was difficult. [Read more…]
Every failure has valuable information you and your team require to improve reliability. During the development process, each failure may represent a future recall. Celebrate every failure. Let your FRACAS prioritize which failures to resolve.
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When something doesn’t work as expected, it is a failure. A common response to a failure by an organization is to restore the system or remedy the situation.
Each failure is unique to the product, industry, customer situation, expectations, etc. Selecting the appropriate response or corrective action when confronted with a failure may or may not be obvious.
Selecting the right corrective action depends on the business and legal factors, along with customer expectations.
For a given failure, thinking through the range of possible responses and selecting the right one takes care to meet the various stakeholder’s requirements or expectations. [Read more…]
How well can you describe the use conditions your product will experience?
How well do you need to know the use conditions?
For some situations, the environment for your product is assessable, others are not. For some situations, we guess the range of expected stresses, others we measure.
The design process and the myriad decisions that impact product reliability rely on characterized environmental stresses.
A great place to consolidate how and where customers will use your product (including the relevant stress factors) is in an environmental manual. [Read more…]
From the simplest to the most complex system, building and using a reliability model permits the entire team to make better decisions.
Understanding and monitoring system reliability involves knowing both:
We use system reliability models to identify weak links, and focus resources, to meet our desired reliability goals.
Being able to build the right model to meet your team’s needs best is one of your roles as a reliability professional. [Read more…]
The term variance is a statistical concept related to the spread or dispersion of a set of data. Second to the mean, it a common value we may calculate.
We find standard deviation easier to understand and use (it uses the same units as the data) whereas variance uses the units squared.
We use variance in quite a few different ways. Let’s review just a few. [Read more…]
