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The Value of Making Better Decisions

The Value of Making Better Decisions

We make decisions every day. Our project teams and organizations have many individuals making decisions every day. Most of these decisions have little to do with product reliability, yet a surprising number of design, marketing, production, and customer care decisions that have a direct impact on product reliability performance.

As a reliability professional, do you work to make better decisions? Do you work to enable the individuals designing, producing, marketing, etc your organization’s products to make better decisions concerning reliability?

If not, why?

Let’s outline a few ways to estimate the value to you and your organization to improve decision making concerning reliability. [Read more…]

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Miami Kicked My Butt

Miami Kicked My Butt

The Plan: Saturday and Sunday was skiing in Vermont with the family,  back Sunday night, everyone off to school Monday morning, then to the airport to get to Miami, Tuesday and Wed meetings down there, then fly out Wed night so I’m back to teach classes Thur and Fri here in Boston.  Easy Peesie!

Actual: Finish ski trip feel a little “strange” on flight down to Miami, slight chills.  Tuesday do meetings just barely, Tuesday night it hits like a freight train, The Flu, or Malaria, Aliens. On Wednesday the freight train had fully passed over me so it stopped and spent Wed backing up over me again. Thursday it went forward again over a pile of human jello. I’m not flying out for the clases on Thur and Fri, or anytime soon for that matter. Just getting home is my mission for the week.

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The 1 Parameter Exponential Distribution 7 Formulas

The 1 Parameter Exponential Distribution 7 Formulas

This is part of a short series on the common life data distributions.

The Exponential distribution is popular and useful in isolated situations. It has some nice features and flexibility that support it’s popularity. This short article focuses on 7 formulas of the Exponential Distribution.

If you want to know more about fitting a set of data to a distribution, well that is in another article.

It has the essential formulas that you may find useful when answering specific questions. Knowing a distribution’s set of parameters does provide, along with the right formulas, a quick means to answer a wide range of reliability related questions. [Read more…]

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10 Things a Maintenance Tech Can Do Today to Improve Reliability

10 Things a Maintenance Tech Can Do Today to Improve Reliability

As companies around the globe look to improve equipment reliability, I can’t help but think of the Technicians and Craftspeople I meet after conference presentations. As they step up to introduce themselves to comment on the presentation, these attendees will often say, “I really liked your presentation, but I don’t think our management would ever support a program like this. What you are doing makes a lot of sense, but we just don’t have the people and our Operations Managers don’t understand maintenance and reliability.” [Read more…]

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SOR 271 Should I Use TTF or TBF Calculations?

SOR 271 Should I Use TTF or TBF Calculations?

Should I Use TTF or TBF Calculations?

Abstract

Kirk and Fred discussing comments we have received throughout the history of “Speaking of Reliability”. In this podcast we discuss one of the questions “should I calculate an average MTTR or MTBF ? “. We review the reasons that calculating an average time to or between failures does little to help make more reliable systems.  ᐅ Play Episode

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How to Calculate Reliability Given 3 Different Distributions

How to Calculate Reliability Given 3 Different Distributions

On occasion, we want to estimate the reliability of an item at a specific time.

Maybe we are considering extending the warranty period, for example, and want to know the probability of no failures over one year instead of over the current 3 months.

Or, let’s say you talked to a bearing vendor and have the Weibull parameters and wish to know the reliability value over 2 years.

Whatever specific situation, you have the life distributions parameters. You just need to calculate reliability at a specific time. We can do that and let’s try it with three distributions using their respective reliability functions: exponential, Weibull, and lognormal. [Read more…]

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Language is The Tragedy of Reliability

Language is The Tragedy of Reliability

I was teaching a class on Reliability 101 a few years ago and it turned out to be one of those great classes where debate and discussion would just pop up all over the place.  I frequently start my classes with “If I end up being the only one speaking today I am going to take that as an indication of complete failure in having engaged you in this material.”  So I was loving that this group were starting to debate each other on the material we were covering.  I wasn’t even in some of the conversations.  This rich environment is where I just spurted out one of my more memorable reliability quotes. [Read more…]

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Is It Faster to Demonstrate Component Reliability at the System Level?

Is It Faster to Demonstrate Component Reliability at the System Level?

Here is a common situation that is considered when reliability testing is being planned. Let’s use letters to designate depth in a product component structure. The top level product is level “A” and a component in top sub assembly is “B”. A sub assembly, of a sub assembly, of a sub assembly, is at level “D”.  So is it more efficient to test the component at level “E” or at level “B”?

Question: Is it more efficient to test the component at level “E” or at level “B” to demonstrate it’s individual goal? [Read more…]

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What do you mean that my phone is obsolete?

What do you mean that my phone is obsolete?

Reliability engineers have traditionally been asked to answer a common question during development of a new device or system, and that is “How long will it last?”.

It is the eternal question in equipment reliability development, and it really comes down to “that depends on many factors”. One question that needs to be asked is how long do you need it to, or should it last? [Read more…]