Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
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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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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Philip and Fred discussing a listener question about how to verify vendor claims about reliability.
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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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Fred discussing just how bad MTBF and related measures are for our profession.
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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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Carl and Fred discussing the pitfalls of using Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) as a metric for identifying reliability requirements.
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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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Adam and Chris Stapelmann discussing metrics for reliability software.
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Andre and Fred discussing why we do not like using MTBF.
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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?
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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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.