Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
When fitting a line or curve to data, it’s a model. When modeling, it is worth remembering the George Box quote, “Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful.” Yet, how do we separate a useful model from one that isn’t useful? One step in finding a helpful regression model is to consider the residuals. BTW: Weibull analysis is another term for regression analysis. [Read more…]
In this special episode of the Maintenance Mavericks Podcast, we have Sanya Mathura, Managing Director at Strategic Reliability Solutions, on the show!
Tune in to learn how Sanya overcame the challenges she faced in the industry, how to bring value to the table, and the importance of bringing people from different backgrounds together for change.
Women in Maintenance is a special series hosted by Caitlyn Young-Gilbert, UpKeep’s Maintenance Community Founder. Caitlyn meets with a female leader in the maintenance industry to discuss their career journeys and share best practices to help other women within the maintenance industry thrive!
Is a reliable product safer? Are the safety elements of a product or system independent of its reliability performance? These and other questions speak to the complex relationship between reliability and safety.
A ‘capable’ process is a really weak term for what we are dealing with here. In short, a process is considered ‘capable’ if it creates products that, in spite of all the unavoidable natural variation in production, still fall within the boundaries of what ‘good’ looks like. Perhaps instead of ‘capable’, we should say ‘amazing’! A ‘capable’ process will essentially create products that have a very, very small chance of being defective. So how do we get here? SPC can help. But how do we measure how ‘capable’ our process is? And can we use this measurement to (for example) work out how many Parts Per Million (PPM) defects you are likely to get? This webinar introduces you to the concept of process capability, including well-known indices like CPK, along with what this means for your process. [Read more…]
Some of my best friends are quality people. This is despite the notion that reliability is just one of many quality factors, while I suggest reliability is all of quality and over time. There are a lot of similarities and common objectives with quality and reliability efforts. Plus, there are a few differences.
You may fondly, or most likely not fondly, remember your undergraduate course on probability and statistics. The calculations of various winning hands with card games were interesting and connected to the early ‘invention’ of probability and statistical methods. Yet, the jar with colored beads was rather boring. [Read more…]
Accendo Reliability has been in the works for about ten years. Counting the various iterations in effect under different names and programs, it has been longer. The idea behind the site is to provide our community with great content to help you solve problems, learn, and improve. A close second concept is to provide a platform to help you share your knowledge.
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We always tell and listen to stories—anecdotes, encounters, best practices, near misses, memories, etc. We also influence how we interpret the world through the stories we tell ourselves. Plus, we often work to alter the stories others have in their head as we work to improve reliability. [Read more…]
Besides building your product inside your customer’s facility, your product will require some form of transportation to move from your factory to your customer. When your product doesn’t work ‘out of the box’, that is considered ‘not good’ for customer satisfaction.
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My guests Cheryl Tulkoff and Greg Caswell discuss their new book “DESIGN FOR EXCELLENCE IN ELECTRONICS MANUFACTURING” (published by Wiley and available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Wiley).
Cheryl Tulkoff may be reached here:
ctulkoff@gmail.com
Greg Caswell may be reached here:
greg.caswell@ansys.com
What role does ‘wishful thinking’ play in interpreting reliability test results? Hopefully, none. A well-designed test will likely provide meaningful results. You and your team may not like the results, yet the results will be clear. [Read more…]
A plan is a road map toward a destination. It provide guidance toward a goal. The idea of a plan is to consider the path forward, the knowledge necessary to acquire, and the decisions along the way.
No plan is perfect other than those that successfully accommodate the successes and setbacks along the way. No plan can anticipate all the information yet to be uncovered, yet it can set a course to deliberately uncover what is necessary to move forward.
Reliable products are also green. This is a relatively simple argument: If an item is designed and built well, it lasts a long time, thus avoiding landfills. Years ago, when living in northern Bavaria, the apartment had a full bedroom set. The entire set was both beautiful and functional. When asked about the furniture, I learned it was over 300 years old. [Read more…]
Reliability testing is expensive. For that expense, the testing results should provide timely, meaningful results. Results that provide actionable information and insights.
The idea of running a set of standard tests or tests that we ‘commonly run’ in many cases has little value. Each test (experiment) should be conducted for specific reasons related to the current project and current knowledge. [Read more…]
I often describe reliability work as we do everything quality does, and we do it over time. Quality folks may disagree. What is not in dispute is that in reliability engineering, we use a lot of different ‘quality’ tools. That is because many quality tools lend themselves to data analysis and problem-solving, [Read more…]
