Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Is a reliable product safer? Are the safety elements of a product or system independent from its reliability performance? These and other questions speak to the complex relationship between reliability and safety.
A ‘capable’ process is a really weak term for what we are dealing with here. In short, a process is considered ‘capable’ if it creates products that in spite of all the unavoidable natural variation in production still fall within the boundaries of what ‘good’ looks like. Perhaps instead of ‘capable’ we should say ‘amazing’! A ‘capable’ process will essentially create products that have a very, very small chance of being defective. So how do we get here? SPC can help. But how do we measure how ‘capable’ our process is? And can we use this measurement to (for example) work out how many Parts Per Million (PPM) defects you are likely to get? This webinar introduces you to the concept of process capability including well known indices like CPK along with what this means for your process. [Read more…]
Some of my best friends are quality people. This is despite the notion that reliability is just one of many factors of quality, while I suggest reliability is all of quality and over time. There are a lot of similarities and common objectives with quality and reliability efforts. Plus, a few differences.
You may have heard of Statistical Process Control (SPC), 6-sigma, Shewhart, the Japanese Economic Miracle, X̅ – R Charts … or perhaps none of them. So if you have heard of these things (and are confused by them) or if you are involved in ‘processes’ (especially manufacturing) then this webinar might help you out. [Read more…]
You may fondly, or most likely not fondly, your undergraduate course on probability and statistics. The calculations of various winning hands with card games was interesting and connected to the early ‘invention’ of probability and statistical methods, yet the jar with colored beads was rather boring. [Read more…]
The idea of Accendo Reliability has been in the works for about 10 years. Longer if you count the various iterations in effect under different names and programs. The essence of the idea behind the site is to provide our community with great content to help you solve problems, learn, and improve. A close second concept is to provide a platform to help you share your knowledge.
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We tell and listen to stories all the time. Anecdotes, encounters, best practices, near misses, memories, etc. We also influence the way we interpret the world around us via the stories we tell ourselves. Plus, we often work to alter the stories others have in their head, as we work to improve reliability. [Read more…]
Other than the situation where you build your product inside your customer’s facility, your product will require some form of transportation to move from your factory to your customer. When your product doesn’t work ‘out of box’, that is considered, ‘not good’ for customer satisfaction.
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Once we have made something really reliable (or really available) … then comes the part where we have to work out how many of them we need (if they make up a fleet) or how many spare parts we need to keep them running. That is where discrete distributions are really helpful. They assign probabilities to ‘discrete’ random variables. These are random variables that can only have certain specified values. Like whole numbers. For example … the number of failures you expect to see in a mission. Or the number of available systems out of a given fleet size. If this sounds like something that could help you out … see you for this webinar!
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What role does ‘wishful thinking’ play in the interpretation of reliability test results? Hopefully, none. A well-designed test will likely provide meaningful results. You and your team may not like the results, yet the results will be clear. [Read more…]
OK … that is a little macabre. But reliability engineers need to ask themselves this question a lot. And they 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 textbooks 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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Products that are reliable are also green. This is a rather simple argument as if an item is designed and built well, it lasts a long time, thus avoiding the landfill. When living in northern Bavaria years ago, the apartment came with a full bedroom set. The entire set was both beautiful and functional. When asked about the furniture, I learned it was over 300 years old. [Read more…]
Reliability testing is expensive. For that expense, the testing results should provide timely, meaningful results. Results that provide actionable information and insights.
The idea of running a set of standard tests or tests that we ‘commonly run’ in many cases as little value. Each test (experiment) should be conducted for specific reasons related to the current project and current knowledge. [Read more…]
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…]
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…]