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What is Wrong With Success Testing?

What is Wrong With Success Testing?

Three prototypes survive the gauntlet of stresses and none fail. That is great news, or is it? No failure testing is what I call success testing.

We often want to create a design that is successful, therefore enjoying successful testing results, I.e. No failures means we are successful, right?

Another aspect of success testing is in pass/fail type testing we can minimize the sample size by planning for all prototypes passing the test. If we plan on running the test till we have a failure or two, we need more samples. While it improves the statistics of the results, we have to spend more to achieve the results. We nearly always have limited resources for testing.

Let’s take a closer look at success testing and some of the issues you should consider before planning your next success test. [Read more…]

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How to Create a Positive Risk Culture

How to Create a Positive Risk Culture

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

As the world begins to unevenly emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s re-evaluation of their lives and work means employee engagement has been replaced by employee experience.

Employee experience is about the critical need for organisations to help people do and be their best. It is shaped by:

  • The work we do.
  • The teams we work in.
  • Our direct managers and how they coach and support us.
  • Our health and wellbeing.
  • The digital, physical, and cultural workplace.
  • How we grow and develop.
  • How much do we trust the organisation.

Even before the pandemic, the work environment was already challenging. Many studies have shown that people felt overwhelmed. They had little time to concentrate, to spend with their families, and there was no time to learn something new.

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Why do Machines and Equipment Continue to Fail? 

Why do Machines and Equipment Continue to Fail? 

 This white paper will teach you how to solve your plant and equipment reliability problems and improve your current plant and equipment reliability up to magnificent performance. 

Since the mid-1980’s we have known exactly how to guarantee incredible equipment reliability. Failure-free machinery and equipment is totally achievable (in fact it is remarkably straightforward to do). We have all the answer—we know all the science; we know all the engineering; all the necessary information is readily available. The research has long been completed. The correct solutions for magnificent reliability are practical and quite doable. The problem that remains, is that though we know exactly what needs to be done to get magnificently reliable machines, we cannot get companies to do it right. The limitation to achieving magnificent reliability is not technical. The limitation now seems to be organisational, cultural, and human factors related.

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Accelerated Life Testing Part-3 (Case Study in Minitab Software)

Accelerated Life Testing Part-3 (Case Study in Minitab Software)

Dear viewers, I am happy to release this third video on Accelerated Life Testing. In this video of part-3, we have explained how to use Minitab software to analyse data of accelerated life test. The illustration uses Arrhenius Model, but the technique can be applied to other models as well.

The video will be useful to all those who want to learn and apply technique of Accelerated Life Testing. It would be of help to those who wish to take ASQ CRE certification exam. It would also be useful to DFSS practitioners.

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FINESSE Fishbone: The First S Stands for Structure

FINESSE Fishbone: The First S Stands for Structure

Reliability engineers and other technical professionals are challenged when communicating their work to senior management. The FINESSE fishbone diagram provides a system-thinking, cause-and-effect approach for communicating in the face of complexity and uncertainty. The first S in the FINESSE fishbone diagram stands for Structure. These three tips and a three-minute video will help you improve the structure of your presentations and reports.

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Always Looking for Someone to ‘Sign Off on That? … Your Organization is Probably Struggling

Always Looking for Someone to ‘Sign Off on That? … Your Organization is Probably Struggling

When I was a bright eyed, motivated (younger) officer in the Australian Army, one my many tasks when deployed overseas was to raise paperwork to formally request ‘battlefield material’ to be sent back home from whatever country we were in. ‘Battlefield material’ was items that included a range of mementos, keepsakes, and things you would typically see in a museum to add to the historical collections of my battalions and regiments back home.

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Defining a Product Life Time

Defining a Product Life Time

An Elusive Product Life Time Definition

The following note and question appear in my email the other day. I had given the definition of reliability quite a bit of thought, yet have not really thought too much about a definition of ‘product life time’.

So after answering Najib’s question I thought it may make a good conversation starter here. Give it a quite read, and add how you would answer the questions Najib poses. [Read more…]

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Is Detailed Design Anti-Agile?

Is Detailed Design Anti-Agile?

Guest Post by Howard M. Wiener (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

In the Beginning . . .

In days of yore, systems development projects were front ended with laborious requirements engineering and design tasks.  This made sense then because development was labor-intensive, time-consuming and expensive.  Changes to the scope or design of a solution mid-development increased the likelihood of errors and incremental time and expense.  In recognition of this, traditional Waterfall project management was applied, which created impediments to modifying the product definition once its development had begun.  Changes were strenuously resisted.

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 How Management Decisions Make or Break Plant Uptime 

 How Management Decisions Make or Break Plant Uptime 

 When you run machines above design rates that decision goes against all that we know about creating high plant uptime and outstanding equipment reliability—in fatigue situations 10% additional stress will cost you ten breakdowns. 

The dominate factor in machine life and production plant uptime is the stress in your machines’ working parts. The stress developed in a part’s material of construction microstructure is directly linked to the force applied to it. It does not matter where the force comes from or why it is applied, once the stress in your parts go beyond their microstructure limits your machines fail. If you want to run at high production rates first ensure that your working parts cannot become overstressed.

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Accelerated Life Testing (ALT) Part-2

Accelerated Life Testing (ALT) Part-2

Dear viewers, I am happy to release this second video on Accelerated Life Testing. In this video, we have discussed (i) Various models used to estimate the acceleration factor, such Arrhenius, Power law etc. (ii) Application examples showing calculation of acceleration factor (iii) Some mathematical relationships to estimate reliability at normal operating conditions and illustrated examples (iv) Types of stress loading used in ALT.

The video will be useful to all those who want to learn ALT and its mathematical relationships. It would be of great help to those who wish to take ASQ CRE certification exam. It would also be useful to DFSS practitioners.

[Read more…]