What Counts as a Failure?
Abstract
Kirk and Fred discuss the analysis of what can or should be considered a failure.
Key Points
Join Kirk and Fred as they discuss the criteria for what constitutes a failure during testing and in the customer’s use.
Topics include:
- Should all failures be counted? Many failures are apparent, especially those that are catastrophic and require repair, but many are just operational and intermittent and can be “fixed” by power cycling.
- The CPUs in PCs can throttle down their processing speed to reduce overheating, and the computer can slow down to a crawl. Should we count this as a failure?
- Kirk talks about his experience on the Dr. Pepper canning line and the many ways the line could cause a production stop, which could all be attributed to an operator or equipment failure, and all could be costly and need to be included as failures.
- Anytime the customer has to call a company about their equipment having an operational failure, it has some cost to the company, regardless of the cause. Even if it is a failure of the operator or the equipment, it all results in the customer’s confidence in the quality and reputation for reliability, and possibly lost sales
Enjoy an episode of Speaking of Reliability. Where you can join friends as they discuss reliability topics. Join us as we discuss topics ranging from design for reliability techniques to field data analysis approaches.
Show Notes
Please click on this link to access a relatively new analysis of traditional reliability prediction methods article from the US ARMY and CALCE titled “Reliability Prediction – Continued Reliance on a Misleading Approach”. It is in the public domain, so please feel free to distribute it. Attempting to predict reliability is a misleading and costly approach to use for developing a reliable system.
Here is a link to the book “Next Generation HALT and HASS: Robust design of Electronics and Systems,” written by Kirk Gray and John Paschkewitz.
At the end of the page for this podcast it says
“Please click on this link to access a relatively new analysis of traditional reliability prediction methods article from the US ARMY and CALCE titled “Reliability Prediction – Continued Reliance on a Misleading Approach”. It is in the public domain, so please feel free to distribute it. Attempting to predict reliability is a misleading and costly approach to use for developing a reliable system.”
I do not disagree with the paper, but unless I am mistaken it is from RAMS 2013 – which is 12 years old. It might be better to say for over 20 years the use of generic data to predict reliability has been challenge to issues identified in this paper over the last decade ago still exist and has been compounded by the continued development of technology, components and knowledge
Thanks for your comment, Richard. As you point out, this may be 12 years old, but it is still true, and as you point out the problem is compounded by the continued development of new electronic components and materials. Yet, still today many are continuing to use prediction even though it has been a misleading approach for decades.