
How to Talk About MTBF
Abstract
Chris and Fred discuss the pointlessness of the MTBF. This comes from a listener who reached out to complain about how lots of industries enforce the MTBF … but why?
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by Christopher Jackson 4 Comments
Chris and Fred discuss the pointlessness of the MTBF. This comes from a listener who reached out to complain about how lots of industries enforce the MTBF … but why?
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by Christopher Jackson Leave a Comment
Chris and Fred discuss … MTBFs! Fred’s favorite! We (should) know that Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) is not reliability. So what do we do if we somehow need to get reliability from nothing but the MTBF.
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by Christopher Jackson Leave a Comment
Chris and Fred discuss the MTBF … and if and when it can be used … sometimes in reliability engineering. We know that the MTBF is one of the most chronically overused (and misused) so-called ‘reliability’ metrics. But is there scope for it to be used … sometimes?
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by Philip Sage Leave a Comment
Philip and Fred discussing a listener question about how to verify vendor claims about reliability.
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by Kirk Gray Leave a Comment
Kirk and Fred discussing how testing a small sample size of a new product results on a larger margin of error for the larger population.
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by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment
Fred discussing just how bad MTBF and related measures are for our profession.
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by Christopher Jackson 2 Comments
Chris and Fred discuss what happens when you can’t avoid having the MTBF imposed upon you – even if it is your own organization and not the customer. Perhaps you are told that ‘our competitors quote the MTBF … so we have to as well!’ But you can (sneakily) tailor test data to get whatever MTBF you want. You can make life easy on yourself by not challenging this paradigm (noting that you will most likely get an unhappy customer). But it is almost impossible to apportion MTBF goals to individual designers that even allow the motivated ones to create a reliable system. So what do you do? Listen to this podcast to help you on your reliability journey.
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by Carl Carlson Leave a Comment
Carl and Fred discussing the pitfalls of using Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) as a metric for identifying reliability requirements.
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by Christopher Jackson 3 Comments
Chris and Fred discuss how management teams across many institutions continue to misuse the MTBF while believing they are fluent in the field of reliability (when they clearly aren’t)!
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by Adam Bahret 1 Comment
Adam and Chris Stapelmann discussing metrics for reliability software.
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by Andre Kleyner Leave a Comment
Andre and Fred discussing why we do not like using MTBF.
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by Fred Schenkelberg 1 Comment
You have carefully crafted a detailed reliability goal including function, environment, probability, and duration, plus apportioned it to critical supplied subsystems and components. Your vendor decides to use MTBF instead.
What can you do? What should you do?
by James Kovacevic 5 Comments
Mean Time Between Failure or MTBF is almost universally recognized in maintenance, reliability, and asset management.
Why is that? And does it actually help an organization improve the reliability of their assets?
The answer is a resounding No.
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by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment
You may already know my position on MTBF.
If not, in short, do not use MTBF at all, ever, in any form. So what should we use instead?
I suggest using reliability, the probability of success over a specific duration.
Let’s discuss what will work for you.