Supportability
(and FMEAs/FMECAs)

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

What is ‘supportability?’ Easy! It’s the ability of your product, system or service to be supported. But how do we get this so wrong so often? Well, the first way is by thinking that supportability is actually some activity where you work out how many spares you need to have on your shelf to last a year (for example). But what if your product, system, or service fails so often and is so difficult to repair that it needs LOTS of spare parts? Working this out doesn’t make it more supportable. Another way people get supportability wrong is by thinking about it AFTER you have designed something. How is this wrong? Well … supportability needs to be DESIGNED INTO your product, system, or service. [Read more…]

Reliability Life Models …
how do you describe your system dying?

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

OK … that is a little macabre. However, reliability engineers need to ask themselves this question a lot. And there are a lot of wrong answers out there. Some textbooks say that it is ‘commonly accepted’ to use this thing called the exponential distribution. Other books say that if the ‘Weibull shape parameter is 6 or greater … redesign!’ Do you have any idea what this means? If not, this webinar will be a nice little introduction for you!
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Fault Tolerance

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

There comes a time in everyone’s reliability ‘journey’ when it is either too hard or too expensive to keep perfecting your product, system, or service. Steel can only be ‘so’ pure. Clearances can only be ‘so’ accurate. Surfaces can only be ‘so’ smooth. And software can only be ‘so’ perfect. In fact, it might turn out to be better and cheaper to have two ‘average’ components, with one acting as a backup to the other. The ‘premium’ component might be too expensive or otherwise not as reliable as the backup system. Welcome to fault tolerance! This is where we design products, systems, or services to be able to handle faults, imperfections, deviations, errors, and lots of other things. [Read more…]

So What is the Root Cause?

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

We all know what the ‘root cause’ is … right? It is the ‘thing’ that caused something bad to happen. The problem is the definition of ‘root cause’ has been abused, misconstrued, re-written, misinterpreted, and all sorts of other things that erode from what it is supposed to be. And by that, I mean it has to be something that we can do something about (and make better). [Read more…]

How to Make a Decision

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

If nothing changes, then nothing changes. Change happens when we decide to do something. The status quo remains if we decide to do nothing. We make decisions every day. We do it so often that it might seem like a trivial thing to do. But we so often get it wrong. We might be influenced by emotion, prejudice, time pressure, budgetary stress, or ‘mental comfort.’ [Read more…]

10 Reasons to do FMEAs

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Everyone knows why we do reliability, and reliability things like FMEAs. Customer experience. Organization reputation. Reduced warranty claims 10 years from now. But these are boring reasons that really don’t motivate me to take FMEAs seriously now. Why should I invest so much time into an activity that benefits the ‘company’ or the ‘customer’ in the future but won’t make an immediate difference when my boss will give me a ‘gold star’ on my next performance appraisal? Right? Wrong! [Read more…]

Fixing the Irrelevance of Reliability in Your Organization: Just ask ‘why’

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

There are so many books on leadership, management, more leadership, reliability, quality, customer first, even more leadership, et cetera. But there remains a common refrain I hear repeatedly from reliability engineers struggling to make a difference: ‘Reliability is just not relevant to my organization.’ There is a common thread to this common refrain – we only hear it from people who work in organizations that don’t have a clear understanding of ‘why’ they are doing what they do.

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Reliability Making Money — Case Study of just looking at a Weibull plot

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Reliability engineers LOVE Weibull plots. They often make sense out of a bunch of seemingly random points. Or at least we feel like they make sense. Anything that turns a bunch of random points into a straight line is automatically making sense … right? Wrong. It is up to us as reliability engineers to look at Weibull plots and work out what is going on. [Read more…]

Reliability Making Money

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

We all know that all you need to work out how many spare parts you need is to put some numbers into a computer, perhaps throw in a ‘confidence’ level as well, and use the number that the computer spits back out at you. Right? [Read more…]

Reliability Analysis … now what? Part 4

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

This is the fourth in our webinar series, ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ We have examined how to turn data points (like the different failure points of devices under test) into something simple, useful, and sometimes beautiful! This is something that commercial software can’t do. [Read more…]

Reliability Analysis … now what? Part 3

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

This is the third in our webinar series ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ The first webinar showed what it means to turn reliability data into something a decision-maker can use. Not a chart. Not a graph. Not a ‘p’ value. Not anything else that you find in a textbook but isn’t useful. Last month’s webinar talked about how the best way to do this is to use computers … but in an easy way! And we talked about creating a ‘posse’ of possible ‘ways’ to explain the data we see. And this webinar is about how we use this thing called Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulation (MCMC) to create this ‘posse.’ And the ‘posse’ isn’t random … it is based on the ‘likelihood’ of each one being the correct one, which is how MCMC works. [Read more…]

Reliability Analysis … now what? Part 2

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Last month’s webinar was ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ And we showed how to slightly ‘tweak’ all those textbook reliability analyses into USEFUL ACTIVITIES. What good is a 90 % confidence bound on reliability? What does this mean for profit? Or fleet size? Or mission success? We solved this problem by identifying the ‘likely’ ways we can explain our data. In fact – there is a whole bunch of statistics on creating the ‘likelihood’ of an explanation of what we see. We use this ‘likelihood’ in most statistical applications – including those USEFUL ACTIVITIES we discussed above. [Read more…]

Reliability Analysis … now what?

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Let’s say that you have some ‘reliability guys’ do some reliability analysis on reliability data … and they give you some numbers. Or a plot. Or a curve. Perhaps you are the reliability guy … and you do the analysis – and then what? [Read more…]