Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
How are quality tools Legos of development?
We talk about two philosophies of brick building and our use of the family of quality tools.
We also talk about seven uses of quality tools in product development.
Chris and Fred discuss how it felt like the 2023 Reliability, Availability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS) went? Was it a success? Is it going downhill?
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Dianna and Fred discussing routine reliability from a listener’s question: when creating a reliability plan for a project, how do we separate the routine and unique parts of reliability activities?
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In this episode I discuss failure analysis component or joint failures during product testing or use and manufacturing problems such as supplier quality problems and manufacturing output that doesn’t meet specifications.
Failure analysis is part of performing a root cause analysis to identify the action, event, or decision that led to a component failing in a product or led to a manufacturing problem. The information from a root cause analysis is used to either fix a problem – in the case of product design and manufacturing – or assign blame – in the case of an insurance claim or litigation.
What types of things might happen when we don’t fully understand, explore, or address:
We explore a public consumer complaint and upset over coffee pods. And we imagine what may have happened (or didn’t happen) during design development that could have helped avoid the issues from the start.
What are some of the lessons learned from coffee pod stories?
We explore this ongoing, public story to gain some insight that we can apply to our own designs.
This is an overview of the six steps to achieve high reliability from Carl and Fred’s book. Creating and executing a reliability plan that assists the team in designing, manufacturing, and supporting meeting reliability objectives takes effort. Let’s discuss the details of that effort so that you can focus on the critical steps. [Read more…]
You don’t have to be in the tech industry you understand importance and value of data. Industries have always collected various sets of data, first manually and, in modern times, automatically. The volume of data has historically been limited to the ability to capture and store it. Recent advances in technology have vastly increased the ability to capture and store data. The industry 4.0 movement has fueled both of desire and requirement to capture data.
We have created a “be careful what you ask for” scenario as we now are capturing data at an unprecedented rate but frequently lack the ability to discern and analyze all of our newly captured data.
My guest today, Luisa Herrmann, Head of Product for Arch Systems, is helping to transform “big data” into useful data. Luisa has 10 years of experience in Product Management and Product Marketing, launching products, building teams, and scaling organizations in the data software space. She was most recently the Head of Product at Cape Privacy, an encrypted machine learning company, and before that she was the Head of Product at expert.ai, an NLP company. She has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and lives in the Boston area.
Luisa Herrmann may be contacted here:
lherrmann@archsys.io
Dianna and Fred discussing hidden reliability wins: when reliability efforts go right, things don’t go wrong. So then, how can reliability engineers quantify their work?
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Philip and Fred discussing what should reliability engineers be working on that are the right things.
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Dianna Deeney interviews Shere Tuckey about Crucial Conversations® in an engineering environment: how to prepare for and have difficult conversations with peers, managers, and everyone else. Shere gave a conference presentation about Crucial Conversations® titled, “How to be Persuasive Rather than Abrasive.”
This interview is part of our series, “A Chat with Cross Functional Experts”. Our focus is speaking with people that are typically part of a cross-functional team for new product development. We discuss their viewpoints and perspectives regarding new products, the values they bring to new product development, and how they’re involved and work with product design engineering teammates.
Shere is a Branch Chief in the Air Force Research Laboratory, Munitions Directorate, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. She is responsible for advocating, planning, budgeting, organizing, and directing the execution of a high-priority technology development portfolio as well as direct supervision and management of all personnel within the branch. Over the last twenty-nine years, she has managed twelve different teams across many engineering disciplines from shock physics experimentation to weapon effects modeling and simulation.
Shere has taken a special interest in leadership, mentoring, and helping teams communicate effectively. After being asked to serve as the Dean of Leadership for her organization’s workforce development program, she became certified to teach the Crucial Conversations® course as a foundational element of leadership development.
She has taught five highly rated classes to high level managers, junior employees, and everyone in between. The positive feedback received from these classes and the course’s universal applicability, has motivated Shere to share this knowledge in as many forums as possible.
Shere also shares stories of success.
Listen to take your communications skills to another level, at work and everywhere else.
Philip and Fred discussing how setting expectations impact reliability engineering tasks and results.
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We have a very special guest, Cody Jackson, the owner of EffectivePdM, who will be sharing valuable insights on how to avoid costly unplanned downtime, eliminate electrical hazards, and transform your facilities into streamlined profitability machines through executing PdM inspections. 🛠️ Tune in now to learn more!
Chris and Fred discuss the age-old problem or regulation. If the regulators are not the adults in the room, then we have a problem.
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(Apologies up front – I recorded this episode using the wrong microphone. So, the sound quality is fair. I’ll do better next time.)
There are microscopic structures and processes in metals that have large effects on metal properties, performance, and reliability. Being able to conceptualize these structures and processes goes a long way toward understanding the behavior of metals and the effects of mechanical processing and heat treating on metal properties. In this episode I discuss some of the microscopic structures and their effects on metal properties.
I also discuss recent projects and a bonus at the end – some details about my recent trip to Seward, Alaska
This is the wrap-up, final episode of our series – the 7th episode in our series about generating ideas with a team toward action.
Since the start of 2023, we focused on a few quality tools and methods to both generate ideas and then choose which idea to pursue.
We’ve talked about:
We also interviewed an expert in brainstorming and learned the importance of planning for teamwork, including choosing our team.
What have we learned through the last few weeks? Let’s highlight take-aways and next steps.
