Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Let's have an in-depth discussion during the live webinar series events: Reliability Engineering Basics, Statistics, Accelerated Testing, Program Assessment, and Improvement. Catch up or review past events below.
To attend an upcoming live event, visit the Live Events section of the site, which lists the available upcoming webinars. Recordings are available via recorded videos or audio only via the podcast show.
Find one that looks interesting and register for the event. You will receive login directions and reminders prior to the event. Plus you will be able to join the discussion during the event.
We always tell and listen to stories—anecdotes, encounters, best practices, near misses, memories, etc. We also influence how we interpret the world through 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…]
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…]
Besides building 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 the 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 interpreting 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. 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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Reliable products are also green. This is a relatively simple argument: If an item is designed and built well, it lasts a long time, thus avoiding landfills. Years ago, when living in northern Bavaria, the apartment had 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 has 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’ 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…]
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 that 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…]
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…]
Only some discussions about reliability go 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. Then, there are meaningful conversations that improve the reliability culture within the organization. [Read more…]
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…]
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 consider the decision’s impact on reliability performance properly. [Read more…]
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…]
