Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Here’s a short list of terms related to warranty management. Often is the words we use that matter and understanding the language of warranties is one step in mastering warranty management.
A promise made to the buyer of an item that the manufacturer (seller) will repair or replace the item if necessary within a specific time period. [Read more…]
A recent LinkedIn discussion addressed the question of the best strategy for dealing with poor supplier performance.
A lot of the respondents seemed to advocate a punitive approach, either threatening the loss of future business if performance doesn’t improve, or combing through the terms & conditions of the contract for enforcement language.
I’ve always thought that there’s a lot of similarity between managing suppliers and managing subordinates, and I wonder if some of these same people threaten their teams with punitive actions when individual performance doesn’t meet expectations. [Read more…]
In short, you probably do, better reliability performance the better the brand image.
When I’m making a purchase I prefer to buy items that I either have personal experience work well over time (reliable) or have many comments and reviews noting the durability.
As a reliability engineer, I am often asked what kind of car I drive (a Toyota Highlander, if must know). Reliability does matter -not only to me- it matters for many making a buying decision.
When a product’s actual reliability performance exceeds the customers expected reliability performance, the customer may consider the product reliable. This experience builds and when supported by other experiences from the same brand, increases brand equity. High brand equity permits a price premium, increased brand loyalty, and increased positive word of mouth support. [Read more…]
When making a transaction there is an element of trust.
The buyer is trusting you are providing a product that lives up to the claims provided. Neither party wishes to be duped. Yet, we do enter into transactions. We buy stuff.
A few hundred years ago and prior most purchases were from someone you knew, and most likely knew well. It was in the craftsman’s best interest to maintain honest dealing and create quality products. If not, they would enjoy less business. [Read more…]
Why do so many avoid failure?
In product development of plant asset management, we are surrounded by people that steadfastly do not want to know about or talk about failures.
Failure does happen. Let’s not ignore this simple fact. [Read more…]
In many parts of the world ‘caveat emptor’ [let the buyer beware] no longer applies.
The producer and distributors of products are liable for their products.
This extends beyond product failures and a warranty claim. Today the company is liable for to make right any loss or damage incurred by the use of the product.
Courts and laws around the world reflect the protection of users of products from adverse consequences due to a negligent design and assembly practices.
The producer of a product must consider the user’s safety and provide reasonable safeguards.
This applies even when the user misuses or abuses a product. [Read more…]
Everything varies.
Your vendors provide components with a range of values. Your production process varies, too.
Creating, monitoring, and maintaining process stability enhances your product reliability performance.
When I started my professional life as a manufacturing engineer, a senior engineer told me we take a product design and can only make it worse.
He said if we could make every unit exactly according to the nominal values of the drawing, every unit would work well. [Read more…]
The operating characteristic curve, OC curve, visualizes a sampling plan.
At times, we select a sample from a group of items and evaluate them. Does this lot of widgets meet the specifications? Does this batch measure up? [Read more…]
The trite answer is just as many samples as you need and not one more.
A better answer is enough samples to make the right decision. The realistic answer is you will not enough samples.
“How many samples?” is an oft-asked question when planning for quality or reliability testing. [Read more…]
Every product and process has built into it elements that impact the safety, quality and reliability performance.
These features will always be present whether deliberately crafted or not. [Read more…]
A break from the normal format.
Reliability.fm is a podcast network focused on reliability engineering topics.
Starting with three shows. Speaking of Reliability and Dare to Know described below, along with recorded Accendo Reliability webinars. [Read more…]
My first major product design review was much less than I thought it would be. This was a new inkjet printer platform and the checkpoint review assessed the teams work and readiness to move to the next stage of development. A team of over 200 engineers and managers meet for 4 hours. [Read more…]
Failures happen. Sometimes product failures happen quickly.
You just bought a new feature rich computer and discover it doesn’t work. Right out of the box, it will not power up. Conversations with the tech support and it’s a trip back to the store.
The failures that occur early the in the life of a product tend —
this ‘tend’ really is just a vague ‘in general’
…tend to occur because of manufacturing errors or shipping/installation damage.
Not always, though. [Read more…]
First off, switches are not perfect, so this situation includes the reliability of the switch. Switch reliability may be a factor of storage time, probability of actually working when called on to work, or number of switching cycles. Each switch technology may be slightly different. For this equation, you need the reliability or probability of success given the primary unit has failed. Although we are assume the switch reliability is independent of the primary unit reliability and subsequent failure.
[Read more…]
This is not the same as a confidence interval. For a mean or standard deviation, we can calculate the likelihood that the true parameter is within a range of values — confidence interval concerning a parameter.
A tolerance interval applies to the individual readings, not the statistics. The interval contains a certain proportion of the values within the distribution of individual data points. The endpoints are tolerance limits. [Read more…]
