So What is the Root Cause?

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

There comes a time in everyone’s reliability ‘journey’ where 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…]

7+ Basic Quality Tools

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

I often describe reliability work as we do everything quality does and we do it over time. Quality folks may disagree. What is not in dispute is work in reliability engineering we use a lot of different ‘quality’ tools. That is because many quality tools lend themselves to data analysis and problem-solving, [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 sort 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…]

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Reliability Discussions

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

Not every discussion about reliability goes well. Some conversations make it obvious reliability is an afterthought or considered a barrier to creating and shipping products. Other conversations seem to support reliability work, yet really are little more than lip service. And, then there are meaningful conversations that improve the reliability culture within the organization. [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…]

Fundamentals of Design for Reliability

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

DFR has been a term in and out of fashion for some time. One of the many DFX type programs. DFR, unlike some of the other Design for X programs has to exist within the overall culture of the organization to be successful. The premise that design occurs at the point of decision implies that each design may have the appropriate information to properly consider the decision’s impact on reliability performance. [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 where that benefits the ‘company’ or the ‘customer’ in the future but won’t make an immediate difference where my boss will give me a ‘gold star’ on my next performance appraisal? Right? Wrong! [Read more…]

How to Plan an ALT

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

The more you understand the failure mechanisms the easier it is to design an accelerated life test, (ALT). Yet, we often do not have all the information we would like to draft an ALT. So, what do we do then?
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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…]

Three Approaches to Accelerated Life Testing

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

When conducting an accelerated life test it is essential to carefully consider the acceleration factor (AF). Like warp drives shortening distance, accelerated life tests (ALT) attempt to shorten time. Think warp factor and acceleration factor as being similar, well sort of. [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 computer spits back out at you. Right? [Read more…]

Three Approaches to Accelerated Life Testing

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

We can make a guess, some assumptions, or conduct an experiment. In fact, we use engineering judgment, prudent assumptions to create our experiments that lead to understanding time to failure information. Accelerated life testing, ALT, is one of the most complex and important types of experiments we conduct. It involves samples, failure mechanisms, stress, measurements, and statistics. [Read more…]

Looking Forward with Reliability Engineering

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

One of the things I like about reliability engineering is the field has a stable set of tools and approaches, with an ever-changing set of challenges. The process to conduct an FMEA or Root Cause Analysis hasn’t changed much over time. Meanwhile the advent of new designs, new materials, new assembly techniques, along with higher customer expectations, we continue to face interesting problems. [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 a bunch of 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…]