Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
In this series on developing a hardware product from idea to scale, we begin with the essential but often overlooked Concept & Feasibility phase. This blog explains the concept half of the process, which addresses the customer, competition, and costs of your product.
[Read more…]
Quality is a measure of how well a product meets specified requirements and standards at the beginning of its life. It’s a static measure that can be controlled and measured with accuracy. Quality engineers focus on designing and implementing quality control processes, conducting inspections and testing, and identifying and addressing defects or issues.
[Read more…]
Published by John Wiley & Sons in 1990 this 601 page book started my career in reliability engineering.
I didn’t know it at the time in the early ‘90s, yet my assigned task to create an accelerated test for a new product would spark an interest in cheating time. Wayne’s book helped make that first accelerated test successful.
The Accelerated Testing book is a compendium of different ways to conduct accelerate tests with a focus on the planning the test and analyzing the data. Wayne is a reliability statistician, and as he will tell you, not an engineer. Thus the book tends to focus on the math.
What I enjoy about the book is the math is not the dry academic derivation driven material, it is full of examples and immediately useful formulas. There is just enough explanation to help the math wonks pursue their interest, and enough practical information to allow engineers to develop and conduct meaningful experiments. [Read more…]
Project Management – it’s not covered by a discrete law but when it’s practiced under a contract it’s open to accusations of negligence, just consider the UK’s Hedley Byrne case. Project Management is seen as a risk mitigation measure and, contractually speaking, this requires a duty of care by its practitioners and/or the legal entity represented. Ignorance of legal requirements is no excuse for not knowing they exist.
[Read more…]
All machines and equipment fail for two reasons—distortion or degradation. Distortion causes parts to suffer such high stress or fatigue that their atomic structures fail. When parts degrade their atomic structure is attacked by environmental elements. Physics of Failure methods lets us analyse equipment for situations that cause their parts’ atomic structures to suffer excessive stress, or to degrade. We can identify the real causes of atomic failure and so institute the fewest maintenance and operational activities to keep equipment at its highest reliability, and the operating plant at its highest availability.
[Read more…]
Dear All, in this video Hemant Urdhwareshe explains the Miner’s Rule for cumulative damage under cyclic loading along with an application example. Your feedback is welcome! Hemant is a Fellow of ASQ, and certified by ASQ as Six Sigma Master Black Belt, CRE, CQE and CMQ/OE.
[Read more…]
When you do RCM you also create an FMEA.
In this video, I explain the connection between Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) and Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA). Many people wonder if these are two different processes, but when you perform RCM, the first four steps—defining functions, identifying functional failures, analyzing failure modes, and assessing failure effects—essentially fulfill the requirements of an FMEA. By following the RCM process, you’re already doing the work needed for an FMEA. I break this down and show how they align.
I’m Nancy Regan, and I hope this clears up the confusion! Thank you for watching.
[Read more…]
Mike Freier, a PRG Partner, authored a series of blogs about how hardware products transition from an idea, through development, manufacturing and volume sales to their eventual end of life. Join us on this journey and learn how to avoid the pitfalls and risks that companies encounter on their way to a successful product launch.
[Read more…]
Neither includes using MTBF, btw.
And, I’m not thinking about the common language definition either.
Plus, I may have this all wrong. Here is the way I think about the reliability of something. More than ‘it should just work’ and different than ‘one can count on it to start’. When I ask someone how reliable a product is, this is what I mean.
By explaining my basic understanding we can compare notes. It is possible, quite possible, that I will learn something. As you may as well. Let’s see. [Read more…]
Given the reliability goal for a system, we often need to understand the reliaility goals for elements within the system. It is a balance between safety, cost, and performance. This short video discussed how to approach allocating reliability goals within a complex system.
[Read more…]
The PMBOK(Project Management Institute Book of Knowledge) Guide states that project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements. Having a good plan, experienced PM, and excellent team is essential to great project management performance. Managing project risks is key to success. Good project management decisions are vital to project success. To achieve this goal, you need good project management leadership.
[Read more…]
Condition Monitoring when used to drive reliability improvement offers diagnostics, information and data for Root Cause Analysis and equipment redesign, along with verification of defect or design correction.
Condition monitoring applied proactively is a context embracing world class reliability maintenance concepts.
Where condition monitoring is used as a proactive defect elimination strategy to drive failure prevention the benefits really add up with improved Reliability giving extended Mean Time Between Failures and additional Plant Availability. There have been recorded instances where the gains in improved plant uptime has lead to deferment of expensive plant expansion.
[Read more…]
Today’s Gremlin – It’ll never work here is the first one we’ll deal with. We’ve all run into him at one point or another. “It’ll never work here” is someone, or many, who has / have been around for a long time. This is one of the many gremlins we talked about when we introduced this series of articles.
[Read more…]Dear Friends, We are happy to share this second video on Response Surface Design. In this video, Hemant Urdhwareshe, Fellow of ASQ and Six Sigma Master Black Belt explains the structure of Response Surface Design with focus on Central Composite Design (CCD). Hemant has taken lot of efforts to illustrate this little complex concept with lot of graphics and animations so that viewers can understand it clearly and quickly. Hemant has also illustrated how to create, analyse and interpret results of Central Composite Design on Minitab with a virtual catapult.
We recommend that viewers should watch our previous videos:
(1) RSM Part-1
(2) Fractional Factorial Designs and Resolution Code
[Read more…]
A mission statement is more than just a set of words on a company’s website or a framed plaque on the wall. When crafted thoughtfully and embraced by leadership and employees alike, a mission statement can serve as a powerful tool for driving behavioral change within an organization. It’s the foundation upon which culture is built and provides direction for decision-making, aligning team efforts with the broader vision. But perhaps most importantly, a mission statement can be a catalyst for shifting behaviors and guiding individuals and teams toward shared goals.
[Read more…]