Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Chris and Fred discuss what are often seen as competing/different/complementary/friendly/unfriendly disciplines … systems and reliability engineering. How does one relate to the other?
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Chris and Fred discuss the use of this thing called ‘Cpk’ which is what we call a ‘capability index.’ This is a measure of how ‘capable’ a typically manufacturing process is, which helps us understand the percentage of defects we create. But reliability engineers often see this as something that ‘manufacturing teams’ or ‘quality people’ do. But is it?
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Chris and Fred discuss what ‘Cpk’ and other ‘capability indices’ mean … especially when it comes to reliability. Never heard of this or want to learn more? Listen to this podcast!
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Chris and Fred discuss reliability goals … and how we ‘allocate’ them to components and subsystems. This is really important, as subsystems and components are often built and designed by different designers or organizations. So how do we translate system-level goals to MEANINGFUL lower-level goals?
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Chris and Fred discuss questions that are easy to ask … but hard to answer. And these questions are often hard to answer because the person asking the question hasn’t thought about the REAL question they are trying to answer. So how many samples do I need for everything to be OK???
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Chris and Fred discuss how statistics, mechanisms, and other technical words that come from ‘reliability engineering’ in contrast to softer terms like ‘facilitation.’ This comes from discussions Chris has had during his Statistical Process Control (SPC) course that he has run previously. So what is the big deal about these words? Well … you can know everything there is to know about statistics and failure mechanisms – but if you can’t make things better then it is all for nothing!
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Chris and Fred discuss a ‘common slope assumption’ … which is something that only those of you with reliability engineering experience will have heard about. This is all about what we called ‘accelerated life testing’ where we increase stresses to accelerate failure. And software that is used to model accelerated life testing. Keen to learn more? Listen to this podcast!
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Chris and Fred discuss statistics! Yay! And how we can be better at using them in a practical way. And that starts with wanting to learn about statistics. But how do we make that happen?
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Chris and Fred discuss what you need to look for when choosing suppliers. The keyword here is the (human) suppliers … not the inanimate supplies!
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Chris and Fred discuss how in spite of all the wonderful new techniques and technologies that are becoming available … we still need to focus almost all our effort on the basics.
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Chris and Fred discuss what it means to be ‘confident.’ Is it the way you carry yourself? Is it being able to rely or trust on something? Or is it the probability that some variable quantity will be within two limits? More importantly … what does this mean in the domain of reliability and quality?
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Chris and Fred discuss what ‘risk’ is. Or what most people think ‘risk’ is. Or what the experts think ‘risk’ is. Or what ‘risk’ feels like. Do you know what ‘risk’ is?
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Chris and Fred discuss a real-world problem … how do we use reliability engineering tools to work out how select a hospital power supply system.
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Chris and Fred discuss … MTBFs! Fred’s favorite! We (should) know that Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) is not reliability. So what do we do if we somehow need to get reliability from nothing but the MTBF.
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Chris and Fred discuss what the purpose of a ‘Body of Knowledge’ or BOK is? … or what is a BOK? … especially when it comes to reliability?
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