We made a cool “Reliability Culture” book launch website. The best part is that they let me put a big countdown timer on it like they have in James Bond films. Ya know, when the villain leaves James Bond in an easily escapable situation and there is a totally unnecessary timer building suspense to his (probably unlikely) demise.

The big difference being that in the Bond film we all know the big delivery will be before the timer goes off. In this situation the timer will go off and the delivery still won’t have happened because of Covid delays. Anyway it’s still cool.

But to save the day you can pre-order right now on Amazon or at Wiley right now.

-Adam

Sometimes we can only test one use case before we ship our product. So what should it be? Should it be the hardest use case? The nominal use case? The 95th percentile use case?

No! It should be the “midlife crisis use case.” What is it? I’ll show you.

[Read more…]

Disappointment, Loss, Anger, Frustration, Fear, Discouraged

This is a direct followup to my post last week.

I usually don’t do two part posts but….

I got some great responses to my post last week.  I then got this image from my buddies at NASA (on the ground, not on the space station). One is actually my roommate from college. His hair is much shorter now.

[Read more…]

Sometimes I see images that speak strongly to how reliability engineering affects us everyday.  Think of how many items you own or use systems that you wouldn’t touch/interact with if  you couldn’t be absolutely sure they would work as expected. I wouldn’t use my microwave if I thought there was a 1/1000 chance it would catch fire.  The amount of faith I have in traffic lights working correctly is astounding.  If they malfunction it could be fatal.

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The clock in my ’79 Porsche 911 works perfectly. I don’t remember the last time I set it.  Maybe I made a small adjustment six months ago, a year ago, don’t know?  A modern day quartz clock does this no problem, a mechanical spring clock might struggle in such a rough environment.  So was it quartz or mechanical? the ’70s was when quartz came on the scene, so either was a possibility. First I wanted to find out if it was ever replaced or serviced. So what did I do?  I contacted the previous two owners.  One purchased it new in ’79 and the other owned it for a five year period before I bought it. Neither recalls it ever being serviced or having a problem.

[Read more…]

I have a customer that has developed an impressive wrist worn biometric sensor for athletes. The system is worn on the athletes wrist, like many other personal devices. But this product is for serious athletes that aren’t just looking for non-descript data like step count and heart rate. What are you even supposed to do with that information?

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“What’s the MTBF of a Human?” That’s a bit of a strange question?

I ask this question in my Reliability 101 course. Why ask such a weird question? I’ll tell you why. Because MTBF is the worst, most confusing, crappy metric used in the reliability discipline. Ok maybe that is a smidge harsh, it does have good intentions. But the amount of damage that has been done by the misunderstanding it has caused is horrendous.

MTBF stands for “Mean Time Between Failure.” It is the inverse of failure rate. An MTBF of 100,000 hrs/failure is a failure rate of 1/100,000 fails/hr = .00001 fails/hr. Those are numbers, what does that look like in operation? [Read more…]

Second Session!!!

“The Perfect Reliability Program Plan”

We held the New England HALT Seminar this past week.  It’s a little fun thing we like to put on every so often here in Boston. We do a few sessions where we talk about Reliability topics, we then play around with the HALT chambers and break a few things. It was great having sponsorship from Espec/Qualmark, and Air Liquide this year.  In past years it has just been me doing a few 30 minute sessions (one man show).  But this year we had four speakers and a diverse set of topics.  Definitely our best one yet.  This may grow to where we can’t do it at the lab any longer. Hopefully not, I don’t want to try and bring a HALT chamber to a conference center.

[Read more…]

We held the New England HALT Seminar this past week.  It’s a little fun thing we like to put on every so often here in Boston. We do a few sessions where we talk about Reliability topics, we then play around with the HALT chambers and break a few things. It was great having sponsorship from Espec/Qualmark, and Air Liquide this year.  In past years it has just been me doing a few 30 minute sessions (one man show).  But this year we had four speakers and a diverse set of topics.  Definitely our best one yet.  This may grow to where we can’t do it at the lab any longer. Hopefully not, I don’t want to try and bring a HALT chamber to a conference center.

[Read more…]