Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
20 years ago, I began my first assignment as a Reliability Engineer at Eastman Kodak’s Photo Chemical facility in Rochester, New York. Now, I understand that I just lost several people who began reading this article by using the words “photo” and “chemical” in the same sentence, but 20 years ago, most photography was still a chemical process. [Read more…]
Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is an excellent tool to ensure linkage of customer needs to product requirements. This article will provide a high-level overview on creating a ‘first-level’ QFD and how it can be used to guide design optimization.
(There are many additional features of QFD , however, and readers of this article are encouraged to research the methodology further.)
As stated above, we use the QFD matrix (similar to a cause-effect matrix) to ensure linkage of customer needs to product requirements using the critical thinking / questions as follows: [Read more…]
As of the date of this note, the Inside FMEA series of articles has completed the “Introduction to FMEA Series,” and is nearly complete with the “FMEA Fundamentals Series.”
This year, Inside FMEA articles will continue on a monthly basis. Each article will be posted for readers on the 1st day of the month.
As soon as the “FMEA Fundamentals Series” is completed, articles will continue with the “FMEA Preparation Series,” followed by the “FMEA Facilitation Series” and the “FMEA Special Topics Series.”
Readers of my book, Effective FMEAs, will continue to find the content of the Inside FMEA articles consistent with the concepts in the book.
It is my sincere desire that each and every person who reads Inside FMEA articles will discover the articles enjoyable to read and experience improved success in FMEA applications. As I say to readers of my book, “best wishes for effective FMEAs.”
Carl S. Carlson
Guest Post by Rod Farrar (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
I have often been asked to provide insight into the management of shared risks, particularly by those working in Commonwealth Government Departments.
Element 7 of the Commonwealth Risk Management Policy states that: each entity must implement arrangements to understand and contribute to the management of shared risks. It goes onto to define shared risks as: those risks extending beyond a single entity which require shared oversight and management. Accountability and responsibility for the management of shared risks must include any risks that extend across entities and may involve other sectors, community, industry or other jurisdictions.
That might sound simple enough – but is it? [Read more…]
Safety showers and eyewash stations are installed when dangerous goods are present. The shower installation has to meet recognised standards like American National Standard Z385.1. This article notes the key requirements for safety shower installations and discusses some practical issues. [Read more…]
If a manufacturing plant was a human brain: Maintenance would be the repairing blood flow, Operations would be the electricity sparking between synapses, and Reliability would be the conscience. [Read more…]
It wasn’t until I was negotiating a salary for an external job offer that I really came to understand my worth in the job market. I started my career with a chemical engineering salary of $60k in 2007. I felt like I had won the lottery to score this salary right out of college.
Over the next eight years, I received annual (merit) raises based on performance, career development raises that coincided with promotions, as well as a few “equity” raises. This put me just over the six-figure mark, leaving me feeling like a ROCK STAR!! [Read more…]
In recent articles I framed the structure of a market analysis to ensure we understand customer needs and value, product requirements are “the what” the design provides (to ensure customer needs are met); the design is “the how” the product requirements will be met.
Product requirements are determined by answering the following question: “What shall the (product) design provide (output) @ input conditions? (Input conditions are functional inputs provided by the user, or environmental conditions.)
A complex product may have several outputs that interface with a system, however, and/or several inputs may be needed in order to enable the product to perform it’s intended function. System integration is therefore required.
Let’s assume your product is a subsystem. The questions become:
How do we establish optimum system performance? We would expect the customer (system designer) would model system performance and provide functional inputs, outputs and specification limits (for your subsystem) in order to achieve optimum system performance.
Accordingly, subsystem integrators should understand system performance well-enough to help system designers with overall system design optimization…at the very least, understand gaps in requirements and associated system/subsystem development risks. The subsystem requirements document therefore is a key deliverable, reviewed in detail and approved by the customer.
An integrated approach to ensuring customer needs and value should be embedded in the product life cycle process, and can save your company (and your customers) millions of dollars in product development costs.
This is part of a short series on the common life data distributions.
The Normal distribution is a continuous distribution widely taught. It is commonly used to describe items, measurements, or time to failure data when there are many additive perturbations that comprise the results. This short article focuses on 7 formulas of the Normal Distribution.
If you want to know more about fitting a set of data to a distribution, well that is in another article.
It has the essential formulas that you may find useful when answering specific questions. Knowing a distribution’s set of parameters does provide, along with the right formulas, a quick means to answer a wide range of reliability related questions. [Read more…]
Reliability engineering includes delivering bad news. This piece of equipment will fail soon, this design won’t survive outdoor use.
We start early with engineering judgment on design weaknesses. Continue by organizing groups to evaluate and comment on what will likely fail. We test, prod, poke and force failures to occur. Then we tally the actual performance and compare that to the what we hoped.
We are the bearers of bad news all too often.
So how do you avoid the stigma attached to that bad news? [Read more…]
The analysis of telematics data with two or more parameters is a complex process. The analysis of multiple parameters using contour plots is a powerful tool since a lot of information is captured in the graphics.
The best results come from a team effort. For engineering data, the team may consist of the design/development engineers, a programmer, and a reliability engineer or a statistician. The following is an analysis of engine speed, engine torque, and the transmission gear state to describe the process.
We have executed and coached many projects. What benefit did they provide? Where can we help within the lifecycle of a project? Each section below contains a 2-minute video to expand on the case study topic provided. [Read more…]
One of the most common mistakes I see at plants and manufacturing facilities around the world is centered on the lack of a good lubrication program. For whatever reason, the task of lubricating equipment in most companies has been traditionally viewed as menial but necessary and delegated to low skill level employees with little or no training in lubrication best practices. It is this type of thinking that results in the unexpected failure of rotating equipment, including, pumps, motors, gearboxes, and bearings. Worse yet are the companies that have no lubrication program at all and somehow believe that someone in the plant will lubricate the equipment when it needs it. Just leave a few grease guns and some oil drums around the site and people will know when to add some. [Read more…]
What if an FMEA recommended action is redundant with the Design Controls? A reader makes this observation about an earlier article, and asks the question about the value of redundancy in FMEA.
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”
Eugene Ionesco
Wouldn’t it be great if we could require the stock market to provide us 15% increases in our portfolio every year…or if we could simply require a sunny day for a picnic?
You might be familiar with the term ‘market requirements’ or a ‘market requirements document’ as a deliverable in the definition phase of a product life cycle process. To understand why market requirements don’t really exist, we must first provide the definition of a requirement. [Read more…]
