Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Chris and Fred discuss when you should run qualification tests again. A qualification test can be anything – essentially all your product, system or service has to do is meet or exceed something to get a tick in the box. So if you make a minor change to your system – do you need to run all your qualification tests again? Can you get away with not doing any? Listen to this podcast to learn more!
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Chris and Fred discuss what it means to have confidence in something. Confidence can mean all things to all people. How confident are you as a person? How confident are you in someone else? What confidence do you have in a conclusion? Statisticians and reliability engineers need to talk to each other where the term confidence has a clearly defined and fixed meaning. But does it? How confident are you in the results of a test? How confident are you in a test that has 75 data points versus one that has 70? How confident will your boss be in you when you present the outcomes of these tests? Have these tests shaken YOUR confidence? Best you listen to this podcast.
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Chris and Fred discuss the typical decisions that are informed by reliability. It might be easier to list what decisions are not informed by reliability engineering. We came up with a list of 13 … and that is only because we ran out of time. What decisions you think are influenced by reliability engineering? Listen to this podcast to learn more.
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Chris and Fred discuss different strategies for reliability. We start with a couple of strategies that don’t work (big shout out to virtually every military customer … ever!) and then come up with some approaches that have been shown to work – at least in some circumstances. And that is the key – different scenarios demand different strategies. Sound interesting? Then this is the podcast for you.
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Chris and Carl discuss reliability management.
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Chris and Fred discuss what a leader, champion and manager are. Many textbooks, guidebooks and so-called ‘domain experts’ tell us what (for example) a ‘reliability leader’ is. In some cases the ‘reliability leader’ is someone who has little influence, and is more of an ad hoc ‘doer.’ Not a leader. Why is this? Listen to this podcast to hear more about this?
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Chris and Fred discuss assumptions – and when you need to check if they are valid. And if you do need to … how do you check these assumptions? Reliability (and all sorts of other engineers) need to study variation and variance. We are often interested in when the first ‘5 percent’ of things will fail. So assumptions on the underlying failure (or random) process are crucial. Sound familiar? Listen to this podcast to learn more.
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Chris and Fred discuss how we need to estimate monthly failure rates of a product. Like when bosses or directors want to know what the ‘failure’ or ‘return’ rate of a product is this month. But is this useful? How do we account for the number of products we have shipped? How old are the products when they fail? And how do we learn from these numbers? Can we even find a number? Listen to this podcast to learn more.
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Chris and Fred continue the discussion on the history of reliability engineering. The discussion started with Chris and Adam (you can click here to listen to it) and kept going with Chris and Carl (and you can click here to listen to it). Between all of them, they came up with 8 reliability engineering epochs. Now it is Fred’s turn to work out what has been missed, and what all of this means what reliability engineering looks like in the future.
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Chris and Carl continue the discussion on the history of reliability engineering. The discussion that started with Chris and Adam (you can click here to listen to it). In the short time they had to talk about it, they came up with 6 reliability engineering epochs. Now Carl is going to see if there is anything to add – and importantly – anything to learn.
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Chris and Adam discuss the history of reliability engineering. Everyone (customer, manufacturer, builder) has different ideas of what reliability is. And this has changed throughout history. Perhaps we can learn something from what reliability engineering has also changed throughout history. As they say – those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it. This is the first of three podcasts that look at the history of reliability for this purpose: seeing what we can learn to help reliability engineering now and tomorrow.
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Chris and Joe Bell from G2OPs talk about systems engineering and how it relates to reliability engineering. Joe and his team focus on Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and was hoping to learn more about reliability and MBSE at the 2020 Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS). Was RAMS successful in helping out Joe? Listen to this podcast to learn more.
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Chris discusses … what you want. Pretty broad I know. But there are things we really want – things we dedicate our time, effort and attention to. And then there are things we say we want. And the human brain is actually specifically structure to pick up on different cues to work out if you are really interested in something (or not). So we can pretty easily work out if you say you want something – but don’t really want it to the extent you want other things. Why does this relate to reliability engineering? Click here to learn more.
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Chris discusses ‘rules’ – rules we need to apply and rules we must bend. Rules can range from traditional practices and procedures through to the laws of nature. But we as reliability engineers need to know which of these rules we must adhere to, and which are our duty to try and bend. Want to learn more? Listen to this podcast!
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Chris discusses ‘reliability security blankets.’ You know what security blankets are – the things that parents offer young children to make them feel safe and comfortable. Not because these blankets actually offer warmth, comfort or safety – but rather because the children associate feelings of warmth and safety with that object because it is ‘always there’ when they are at home or go to be. A reliability security blanket does the same thing – it calms the leaders, managers, bosses, and directors of an organization. But – that is it! There is no reliability to be found. Want to learn more? Listen to this podcast!
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