Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
The process of creating a statement that includes the function(s), environment and use conditions, probability of survival, and duration for an item. It is the reliability performance objective for the item under consideration. It provides a detailed statement that is measurable to communicate the desired reliability performance of an item. Included is sufficient information to guide decisions related to material selection, design architecture, and types of or expected environmental and use stresses.
Reliability engineering has value. It can improve product reliability, increase uptime, and drive customer satisfaction, for example.
Here are a couple of stories based on real situations that resulted in significant value for the organization.
It always seems there are more red lights when I’m running late.
This comment and others similar to it caught my attention lately. Is it just Murphy’s Law or something else?
There is an element of luck or chance in many events during our daily lives. The same is true when producing products and the resulting reliability. A lot has to go right for the product to work for the customer.
When something isn’t going as expected, we have a comparison that gains attention. If the lights are red more often, in theory, when I’m running late, maybe the lights are not turning red more often, it’s just that we notice.
For product development, it’s noticing the items that are going well and failing that matter. As reliability professionals, we need to continue to practice being aware of what is expected and what actually happens. [Read more…]
A life-support-equipment company manager desires to conduct a reliability program assessment. The company is experiencing about a 50% per year failure rate and at least the Director of Quality thought it should do better. One of the findings was related to reliability goal setting and how it was used within the organization.
Nearly everyone knew that the product had a 5,000-h Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) reliability goal, but [Read more…]
The target, objective, mission or goal is the statement that provides a design team with focus and direction. A well-stated goal will establish the business connection to the technical decisions, related to product durability expectations. A well-stated goal provides clarity across the organization and permits a common language for discussing design, supply chain, and manufacturing decisions.
Let’s explore the definition of a ‘well-stated reliability goal.’ First, is it not simple MTBF, “as good as or better than…” or ‘a 5-year product’. These are common ‘goals’ found across many industries, yet none permit a clear technical understanding of the durability expectations for the product.
The common definition for reliability is [Read more…]
