on Product Reliability

A listing in reverse chronological order of articles by:

Kirk Grey — Accelerated Reliability series

Les Warrington — Achieving the Benefits of Reliability series

Adam Bahret — Apex Ridge series

Michael Pfeifer — Metals Engineering and Product Reliability series

Fred Schenkelberg — Musings on Reliability and Maintenance series

Arthur Hart — Reliability Engineering Insights series

Chris Jackson — Reliability in Emerging Technology series

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment

A Story About Plus One

There are many scenarios that can arise throughout product development programs. There is one in particular that I have seen unfold more than once: I call it the “Plus one program.” Don’t let the name fool you; it’s horrible to watch unfold.

A startup or established player introduces an impressive jump in industry-standard technology, or sometimes an established player introduces an innovation to their industry. Since the technology is so innovative, there is great value in getting it to market quickly even if it isn’t a mature design. In this case, it is actually a smart move to go to market with a device that doesn’t have “ideal reliability.” In other words, the value of getting it out there quickly is worth the field issues. Those issues will be tolerated by the customer as well, if the technology is that good.

[Read more…]

by Christopher Jackson Leave a Comment

You Can’t ‘Contract’ your Way to Reliability

A recent student of mine was an engineer for a rail corporation. Let’s call her Liz. Liz kept asking me ‘what do I need to put in a contract’ to make sure my suppliers take reliability seriously? She kept asking this over, and over, until I got the penny to drop. Liz eventually realized that she was the one who had to take it seriously. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Lessons Learned via Golden Nuggets

One of the enjoyable parts of reliability engineering work is the consistent need to learn. We learn how new materials, designs, applications, and systems work, and fail. Sometimes we learn through proactive characterization studies, sometimes via unwanted field failures.

Failures will occur, it is what we learn from them that matters. The ability to gather and remember the lessons learned is a common and ongoing need for every organization. We are not very good at it, in general. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Dealing with Reliability Related Uncertainty

Uncertainty is another word for risk. Reliability uncertainty or risk is neither good nor bad, it just a bit unknown. Until we know the outcome, the eventual reliability performance, we will not know the impact.

So, how do we deal with reliability uncertainty? Will our product or system work as expected over time, or will it fail? Let’s examine a few of the common approaches in use and when and why the approach is effective. [Read more…]

by Christopher Jackson Leave a Comment

Do Degrees Hurt or Help?

Remember how we were told as kids in school that we had to study hard to get into college or university? There was that ongoing, implied threat that not getting into university or college would ruin our career. Or at least, be very bad.

It turns out it may not be that bad after all. For example, over half of Apple’s employees don’t have 4-year degrees. Why? [Read more…]

by Adam Bahret 2 Comments

HALT shouldn’t be “H.A.L.T.”

The fist part of this post you likely already know. It’s the second part that may be helpful.

I love HALT testing and almost always include it in a new program. With a team new to the concept there is always the hurdle of getting them to understand it’s value. It’s not intuitive to see value in destroying a product with stepped stresses. Often these stresses aren’t even apart of the product’s use case. Why vibrate a lab electronic device that spends its entire life on a bench? Seeing the failure mode is a capacitor flying off the PCB at 50 G’s doesn’t reinforce the value of the activity without some explanation.

[Read more…]

by Christopher Jackson Leave a Comment

How Company Visions Make or Break Reliability

Every organization needs to be able to explain ‘why’ it is here. In fact, an organization’s ‘why’ is . Check out Simon Sinek. One of his favourite phrases is that ‘people don’t buy what you do – they buy why you do it.’

People buy Apple products because of they enjoy how they interface with devices that are part of a bigger and seamless ecosystem. All their competitors try to emulate this. Amazon is all about customer experience. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

A Two-Step Approach to Get Better at What You Do

How is it that some people continue to get better at managing meetings, designing complex test plans, making presentations, or solving problems? How in general do people improve their performance over time at something? [Read more…]

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment

Using Statistical Confidence to Protect your Family

A helpful analogy in communicating the concept of statistical reliability confidence is the “new airplane” example. Let’s say I am developing an entirely new technology for airplanes. The airplane has an engine that has never been used before for air travel; a fusion engine. I tell the world that this new airplane with a fusion engine will have a reliability of 99.99999999%, the highest any airplane has ever had. It’s not possible to fully demonstrate this reliability until every single unit of this airplane has been produced, used to full life, and the full fleet is retired. As long as one is still flying it can add or subtract from the reported reliability number. So, how do we make decisions at product launch regarding the design’s reliability? No products have yet to be produced or used by customers, so how can we trust the design?

[Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

One Does Not Simply Do Reliability

Some time ago when talking with someone I just met, the conversation turned to what we did for a living. I mentioned being a reliability engineer, and his response: “Oh, yes, we do reliability”. Curious, as I’m not sure that I ‘do reliability’, we then talked about what he meant.

The conversation revealed that they had a list of tasks that they accomplished for each product under development. They did tests and reviews of the results. A lot of testing. They did FMEA and HALT. He believed the engineers did derating or stress/strength calculation. He didn’t know about process stability with vendors or internal manufacturing lines.

They did stuff, which meant they did reliability.

[Read more…]

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment

Not a car analogy: How RG is like cooking

Anyone who knows me knows that I tend to only think in terms of cars. I can remember the car someone pulled up in at a party four years ago, but will have no recollection of what their name was. Moreso, I view culture, politics and economics through a sort of automotive anthropologist lens. For example, darker colors are more popular in luxury car sales when an economic downturn has occurred and major shifts in industrial focus will be reflected in increased offerings of economy cars that can hold 4 to 5 people. I think you can see what the problem is here.

In any case, I came up with a cooking analogy (in no way automotive related) for a principal of data organization and I have to say, it’s actually pretty good! So, I am documenting it here.
[Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

The Value of a Great Question

Some time ago, earlier in my career, I worked for a wonderful boss. She would stop by my office on occasion and ask ‘what’s new?’ or “how’s it going?’ Just a check-in. I often let her know about the current vexing problem I was struggling with at the moment.

The funny thing is she never directly solve the problem for me. She certainly could have. Instead, she would ask a couple of questions that always helped me to find the solution. This happened with problems concerning dealing with a difficult person, strange material properties, motivating change within a group, or finding someone that could design and run a computational fluid dynamic model for me.

It was her questions the helped. She did this in meetings, in presentations, and when she swung by my office for a chat. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Infrastructure Is Not a One Time Investment

In a recent blog post, Seth Goin discussed the need for ongoing investment to maintain infrastructure. Whether a road or building or even your own skills, it takes regular care to avoid system failures or obsolesce. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Is SPC Part of the Reliability Toolkit?

Statistical process control, SPC, is a set of tools to enable monitoring the stability of a process. SPC is also the first step to checking process capability with measures such as Cpk. Many consider SPC a quality or manufacturing tool. Yet, having and maintaining a stable process is also essential to creating a reliable product. Let me explain why. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Reliability Questions and Decisions

Very few reliability decisions are made by reliability engineers. Yet, reliability engineers are asked many questions concerning reliability. How reliable will this design be for customers? How will the system likely fail? How many failures should we expect next month?

How you answer these and the many other questions received does impact the reliability of your product or system. The information provided those that ask reliability related questions, with useful and practical information, can make better decisions which improves reliability performance.

[Read more…]