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The Changing Support for a Reliability Engineer

The Changing Support for a Reliability Engineer

In most organizations being a reliability engineer is a lonely position. I like to think we’re so effective that one or just a small team is all any an organization needs.

As with any engineering position, we have specialized training and skills. We view the world and problems just a little differently than others. Then we use statistics, which tends to future isolate us from our peers.

For over 50 years there have been professional societies focused on supporting the professional education of reliability engineers. For nearly as long there have been trade journals and newsletters. Longer for technical journals and other scientific and engineering organizations and journals. [Read more…]

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5 Reasons Why Your Top Performers Leave and What You Can Do to Keep Them!

5 Reasons Why Your Top Performers Leave and What You Can Do to Keep Them!

Those who know me well know I am a voracious reader.  From newspapers and magazines to business related books and novels it’s a rare site to find me without my Kindle or some type of printed reading material.  Lately I have noticed a number of articles on the reasons why your best employees are leaving your business and I have to say I saw this problem trend coming more than a decade ago. [Read more…]

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Project Management: A risk to Product Delivery

Project Management: A risk to Product Delivery

Guest Post by Malcolm Peart (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Project Management: A risk to Product Delivery

Most of us are aware of the old saw “the operation was successful, but the patient died!” which has been around since 1829 and used to describe medical, as well as military and business failures.  There are many reasons for failure but is ‘over-management’ one of them? Can too much ‘project management’ be applied to the point that the aim of the project, i.e. the product, is compromised? [Read more…]

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Ensuring Linkage Between Requirements and Verification

Ensuring Linkage Between Requirements and Verification

One of several reasons for emphasizing product requirements includes enabling modeling and simulations of designs, as well as ensuring adequate verification and validation testing.

 

 

Recall the fundamental framing of a requirement as:

  • “What shall the design provide (output) @ input conditions?”
  • “What does design need (inputs) from the customer in order for the design to perform as expected?”

Note the framing (within the requirement) of a mathematical and/or experimental relationship where “Y” is the output as a function of “(x)” as the input….Y = f(x) or as a function of multiple inputs Y = f (x1, x2, x3…xn).  Let’s expand on this for a moment:

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The 2 Parameter Pareto Continuous Distribution 7 Formulas

The 2 Parameter Pareto Continuous Distribution 7 Formulas

This is part of a short series on the common life data distributions.

The Pareto distribution is a univariate continuous distribution useful when modeling rare events as the survival function slowly decreases as compared to other life distributions. This short article focuses on 7 formulas of the Pareto Continuous Distribution also known as the Pareto distribution of the first kind (there are three kinds, apparently). [Read more…]

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Having to Compromise Nothing

Having to Compromise Nothing

I was asked “Do you know about Singularity design?”  I hadn’t heard the term in that context before.

It’s the concept of not approaching design from multiple disciplines.  The design process is done with an approach and knowledge base of all needed disciplines at once and in conjunction.  The electrical system isn’t designed by an electrical team and the mechanical by a mechanical team.  The “Design Team” designs both simultaneously.  Team members knowledge might be rooted in one discipline but there is clearly no boundary to their knowledge of other disciplines.  This would be a mechanical engineer who has designed a PC board before.

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Process Capability Analysis II – Percent Defective Estimates

Process Capability Analysis II – Percent Defective Estimates

Introduction

In my prior article, Process Capability I – Overview and Indices, the process capability concept was defined for prototype samples and serial production. The data is assumed to be normally distributed and Pp, Ppk, Cp, and Cpk indices were defined. Its application to one-sided and two-sided tolerances was discussed. This article provides methods to estimate the percent defective.

The Data

The engineering tolerance for a critical characteristic is 10±0.2. So the lower specification limit (LSL) is 9.8 and the upper specification limit (USL) is 10.2. A sample of 30 parts provided measurements of the critical characteristic. The sample mean ($-\bar{x}-$) was 9.951 and the sample standard deviation (s) was 0.1825.

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Rethinking Risk and Uncertainty

Rethinking Risk and Uncertainty

Guest Post by Geary Sikich (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Rethinking Risk and Uncertainty

What is risk?  Think about it before you leap to answer.  Do we really know and understand risk?  Some facts to consider:

  • Risk is not static, it is fluid.
  • Risk probes for weaknesses to exploit.
  • Risk, therefore, can only be temporarily mitigated and never really eliminated.
  • Over time risk mitigation degrades and loses effectiveness as risk mutates, creating new risk realities.

Risk management requires that you constantly monitor recognized risks and continue to scan for new risks.  This process cannot be accomplished with a ‘one and done’ mindset.  Risk needs to be looked at in three dimensions and perhaps even four dimensions to begin to understand the “touchpoints” and aggregation of risk, potential to cascade, conflate and/or come to a confluence. [Read more…]

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The Quality Triangle and Reliability

The Quality Triangle and Reliability

The quality triangle is an admission that every project has design constraints. Note that reliability is rarely listed directly within the triangle, yet reliability does impact each element of the triad.

In a world where the design team is beset with numerous design for X priorities, understanding how reliability related to the top three and most common set of constraints is imperative.

For any set of priorities, you should be able to convey how addressing reliability performance in the design and assembly process impacts those priorities. Addressing reliability can improve quality, reduce the risk of launch delays, and reduce the cost of a product. All this and improve customer satisfaction as well.

Let’s explore a few ways you can connect reliability priorities to the common quality triangle priorities. [Read more…]

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Understanding Design Constraints

Understanding Design Constraints

While previous articles focused on requirements writing, another element of products requirements is design constraints.

A design constraint might not be a requirement in the purest sense, but must be accommodated in product requirements (and, ideally, identified as such).  Design constraints almost always make their way into product requirements.

Let’s use a simple example whereby a specific housing material is specified (a polyester thermoplastic elastomer).

The requirement might simply be: “The housing material shall be made of a polyester thermoplastic elastomer”.  The PRD is then provided to the designer, essentially telling him he must use this material.

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