Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
One of the very first plots to do with a string of data is a simple run plot. This plot provides information related to location, trends, patterns, and anomalies, The plot of the data over time is a rather informative chart.
You have most likely constructed many run charts; if not you really should. This short introduction to the run chart will cover creating and interpreting them. Plus we’ll mention a few cautions and tips, as well. [Read more…]
When a reliability engineer or manager does their job well, the product just works as expected. Maybe even a little better than expected. There isn’t any major problems that need a hero to resolve.
Work done well, may go unnoticed. To avoid that you need to master the art of promoting successes without coming across as bragging or boasting. For your career advancement, you need to be both successful and likable.
For your program and ability to influence outcomes, you also need to be seen as successful, valuable, and again likable. [Read more…]
Only some discussions about reliability go well. Some conversations make it obvious reliability is an afterthought or considered a barrier to creating and shipping products. Other conversations seem to support reliability work, yet really are little more than lip service. Then, there are meaningful conversations that improve the reliability culture within the organization. [Read more…]
Stratification implies layers or differences. A quick test for soil composition is to place a sample of soil with water in a clear jar and give it a shake. The sand, silt and loam will settle at different rates and create a layered appearance within the jar over time. The height of each layer provides information about the proportion of each type of soil within the sample.
Stratification as one of the seven basic quality tools (some lists use a run chart or flowchart instead) the idea of layers or differences still applies. The idea is to identify potentially meaning differences within a sample set. [Read more…]
While in the US Army many years ago, I took command of an artillery battery. My first day included sitting down with my boss, the battalion commander. I’ve used the advice he gave me every day since.
He said that I needed to make decisions. It’s great when they are good decisions, you can learn from decisions that don’t work out well. He also said the only thing not allowed is not making a decision.
I learned that decision-making is a process and that I could get better at it with practice and feedback, and I did. [Read more…]
A histogram is a graphical representation of a set of data. It is useful to visually inspect data for its range, distribution, location, scale, skewness, etc. There are many uses for histogram, there you should know how to create one.
Let’s explore a set of data and create default histograms using a variety of methods. If you have a way to create a histogram using some other method or software package please send it over and we’ll add it to the article. [Read more…]
DFR has been a term in and out of fashion for some time—one of the many DFX type programs. DFR, unlike some of the other Design for X programs, has to exist within the overall culture of the organization to be successful. The premise that design occurs at the point of decision implies that each design may have the appropriate information to consider the decision’s impact on reliability performance properly. [Read more…]
In the situation where you have a sample and would like to know if the population represented by the sample has a mean different than some specification, then this is the test for you. In this case, you do not know the actual variance of the population, you just have a sample.
This test is often the second one in a textbook that describes hypothesis testing. It is a useful hypothesis test and applies in many situations as we rarely know the population variance. [Read more…]
The essence of creating a reliable product involves making informed decisions. Informed related to the implications of the various options on reliability performance. Yet, these decisions, made nearly every day during the early stages of a product’s lifecycle are fraught with uncertainty.
There is an approach that instead of making perfect decisions every time, we instead focus on making decisions that allow us and others to learn the necessary information to then make better decisions. [Read more…]
The more you understand the failure mechanisms, the easier it is to design an accelerated life test (ALT). Yet, we often do not have all the information we would like to draft an ALT. So, what do we do then?
[Read more…]
One of the key ideas behind the ASQ CRE certification is the need to learn enough to pass the exam. Then you are expected to continue to learn to maintain your certification. It is the key idea of ongoing professional development that central to the CRE program, and many other certification programs.
Over this past year of COVID-induced restrictions, the ability to attend local chapter meetings or conferences has changed. While many events are now done online, it’s another Zoom meeting after a day full of such online meetings.
A recent article by Anant Agarwal, the founder and CEO of edX titled, “What I’ve Learned About Learning – 5 Hacks for Success” caught my attention. Anant provides a few tips to improve your online learning – and I would say any learning. A little research on how to best learn online also found “Tips for Successful Online Learning” that helped inform this short summary. [Read more…]
The way we think and act concerning creating a reliable product or system defines the reliability culture of an origination. I trust your organization doesn’t complete the design then ask the reliability folks to ‘add the reliability element’ or ‘test to prove it’s reliable enough’.
Another ineffective approach is to perform many reliability-related tasks, like a design FMEA, HALT, ALT, derating, margin and environmental testing, life testing, demonstration testing, etc More is not better. If the focus is just doing the list of tasks, with little information acted upon, then this approach is little more than a waste of resources.
So, what is it that makes a wonderful design for reliability program? It’s not expecting the reliability team to do it on their own, nor is it checking off a long list of tasks. It is the focus across the organization, inside and outside the design and development team, that each decision made has an impact on reliability performance. As such, the work of the DfR program is to enable each decision to be well informed concerning the potential impact to reliability involved with the pending decision. [Read more…]
Nicholas W. Eyrich, Robert E. Quinn, and David P. Fessell published in the Harvard Business Review an article titled “How One Person Can Change the Conscience of an Organization”, dated December 27, 2019. In the article, they discuss how corporate transformations, while assumed to occur from the top-down, actually it is the middle managers and first-line supervisor that can make significant change happen.
They look at what it takes for one person to make a significant change within an organization. As reliability or quality professionals, we often have the opportunity to spot needed changes. It is then up to us to tackle those challenges to make the change happen. [Read more…]
One of the first things to do when faced with a set of numbers is to plot them. A histogram is often the first choice, maybe a dot plot. Up your data plotting skills and let your data provide a bit more information by using a box plot. [Read more…]
A common practice I’ve seen in organizations is to deal with field failures when they occur. This may occur when the mistaken assumption that no failure will occur due to ‘such an excellent design.”
Ben Franklin may not have been thinking about future product failures, yet his quote:
By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail.
implies we need to prepare ourselves and our organization to deal with field failures. Having clear processes to deal with field failures is a best practice. [Read more…]
