The Business Skills of a Good Reliability Engineer

Knowing how to estimate sample size or create a Weibull plot is not enough today.

Just having technical skills, while essential, is not sufficient.

Having a master of business administration (MBA) may be helpful, and it is not required; knowing the warranty and brand cost per failure is essential.

You also need to know which analysis to conduct and how it fits into the larger program and organization, plus how it impacts your customers. You also need to understand the business side of your work.

You need to understand the business connection as you create plans and finalize analysis. Each test proposed should include a business connection. Each proposed improvement has to balance with other priorities and objectives and remain compelling.

What is Important to Your Organization?

I don’t know, as I write this, what is important to your organization today. It varies, even within an organization and over time. You do need to know what is important and why to become a good reliability engineer.

It is not enough to do what someone tells you to do. At first, that may get you started, yet how you connect your work to adding value becomes essential. Practice finding the connection with every task.

Ask questions.

• When do you need this information?
• When will this need an initial review?
• When do you need a budget estimate?
• Who will review this report?
• Who will need this information?
• What level of reliability knowledge does the audience have?
• What level of detail is necessary?

And, so on…

The idea is to find who needs what by when and why.

This helps you plan, focus, and deliver what is considered important at the moment in your organization.

Typical Priorities

For a high-volume consumer product sold during the holiday period, time to market may be the top priority. This is because a delay in shipping means the loss of sales for the year. Missing the deadline is not an option. Thus, your work as a reliability engineer has to focus on how you can minimize the risk of any delays.

Now, you know that finding a critical reliability issue late in the process may delay the program, therefore focusing on reducing the chance of a late discovery is your focus. Early testing and development work on the highest risk element may help you identify reliability risks that have a long lead time to test and evaluate.

For an industrial product with relatively low volume, the time-to-market pressure is not as intense. In this case, the brand image may be paramount. Thus, getting the initial units as reliable as customers expect becomes an overriding priority.

One of the issues with this situation is the lack of prototype systems to evaluate. You may not have the capability to test full systems in any quantity prior to to the start of production, if ever. Thus, you work to identify and characterize each potential failure mechanism, which becomes critical. The ability to create a viable system model allows you to prioritize your work on improving the critical few elements that will impact system reliability performance.

Other priorities may focus on cost reduction, cutting-edge feature sets, or ease of use. Your organization likely has a clear priority. It’s then up to you to connect your work in reliability engineering to that priority.

Now Connect Each Reliability Task to the Value it Provides

For each reliability task proposed or delivered, what value does it provide in relation to the primary priority (or secondary priority) in a clear and concise way? If the task or activity doesn’t add value, why are you doing it?

In the high-volume consumer product situation, reducing the risk of a shipment delay provides value. Let’s say you are proposing HALT early in the program. How would that add value? By potentially identifying design or manufacturing faults if discovered late in the program, you would delay the project, and then you would arguably reduce the risk of delays by some amount.

For the low-volume complex equipment situation, a HALT would improve the ability of the team to find and solve complex issues that may otherwise go undetected. Again, HALT would add value. In each case, there is no hard and fast formula, yet there is a clear step-by-step connection between the task and the value to the organization.

Summary

There are two steps here. First, understand the business and customers to the extent that you clearly understand what is important. Second, articulate the value related to the business priorities for each reliability task or activity.

To see more examples and ways to show value, see the book Finding Value: How to Determine the Value of Reliability Engineering Activities.

Your skill at connecting your work to value enhances your ability to focus on what is important and necessary. Thus, it helps your customers, organization, and your career.