Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
I am a firm believer in the notion of doing everything with the end-goal in mind. That is the only way we can gauge the effectiveness of our efforts. The same is true for all our efforts related to Maintenance & Reliability.
If & when you want to measure a certain maintenance task for its effectiveness (you should be doing it quite often); the best way is to identify whether the desired outcomes associated with that specific task are being realized or not. [Read more…]
Carl and Fred discussing some of the biggest myths surrounding reliability, based on their experience in managing reliability programs.
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60% of failures and safety issues can be prevented by ensuring there is a robust equipment design and that Maintenance & Reliability is taken into account during the design phase. Equipment should be designed with the following in mind:
(Reproduced from the article “Death of a Reliability Engineer” by Dev Raheja, Reliability Review, Vol. 30, March 2010 with permission)
When I first wrote the article in March 1990, I implied an ‘F’ grade to reliability engineers. Now almost 20 years later, I would give them a “E’. Yes, there is a little improvement but nothing you can write to your mother about.
The MTBF cancer was wide spread and is still wide spread in the DoD. The only reason I upgraded the reliability engineer from F to E is because the MTBF in some industries is no longer used such as in the automotive industry. They use the failure rates instead to hide their shame.
Failure rate is just the reciprocal of MTBF. Good job! Same old corn flakes with a new product name! [Read more…]
Carl and Fred discussing the subject of reliability allocation, how it is used and some of the pitfalls in application.
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Jezdimir Knezevic of the MIRCE Akademy published a paper with the title above and I have a few comments.
In the article, Jezdimir suggests that the statistical approach to describing the world about us is fundamental flaws and not inherently useful for our use. He compares a mathematical/statistical approach to a scientific approach and finds the stats wanting.
Let’s take a critical look at the topic of this paper and conclusions. [Read more…]
Kirk and Fred discussing how his career path led to being a reliability engineer and meeting a working with Gregg Hobbs. Ph.D. the reliability leader that gave him a new perspective on HALT and HASS.
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Kirk and Fred discussing ways to find intermittent system failures.
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Kirk and Fred discussing a real case of product failure for a OEM sub-supplier and determining how to isolate the cause
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Kirk and Fred discussing the value of getting field failures returned for failure analysis and best practices in determining the causes.
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Testing is expensive. Reliability testing is often complex. Let’s break down the basics of planning and conducting reliability testing that provides meaningful results cost-effectively and timely. Let’s do testing right.
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Carl and Fred discussing the question: Is it more important to calculate reliability or to achieve reliability?
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Kirk and Fred discussing the issue of long term reliability, intrinsic wear-out, and the rapid improvement of new features and benefits that motivate retirement of older devices such as in smartphones.
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Kirk and Fred discussing the long, ever-impending death of the outdated reliability prediction handbook and its progeny.
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As companies around the globe look to improve equipment reliability I can’t help but think of the Technicians and Craftspeople I meet after a conference presentation. As they step up to introduce themselves to comment on the presentation some 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…]
