Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
All articles listed in reverse chronological order.
If a manufacturing plant was a human brain: Maintenance would be the repairing blood flow, Operations would be the electricity sparking between synapses, and Reliability would be the conscience. [Read more…]
It wasn’t until I was negotiating a salary for an external job offer that I really came to understand my worth in the job market. I started my career with a chemical engineering salary of $60k in 2007. I felt like I had won the lottery to score this salary right out of college.
Over the next eight years, I received annual (merit) raises based on performance, career development raises that coincided with promotions, as well as a few “equity” raises. This put me just over the six-figure mark, leaving me feeling like a ROCK STAR!! [Read more…]
In recent articles I framed the structure of a market analysis to ensure we understand customer needs and value, product requirements are “the what” the design provides (to ensure customer needs are met); the design is “the how” the product requirements will be met.
Product requirements are determined by answering the following question: “What shall the (product) design provide (output) @ input conditions? (Input conditions are functional inputs provided by the user, or environmental conditions.)
A complex product may have several outputs that interface with a system, however, and/or several inputs may be needed in order to enable the product to perform it’s intended function. System integration is therefore required.
Let’s assume your product is a subsystem. The questions become:
How do we establish optimum system performance? We would expect the customer (system designer) would model system performance and provide functional inputs, outputs and specification limits (for your subsystem) in order to achieve optimum system performance.
Accordingly, subsystem integrators should understand system performance well-enough to help system designers with overall system design optimization…at the very least, understand gaps in requirements and associated system/subsystem development risks. The subsystem requirements document therefore is a key deliverable, reviewed in detail and approved by the customer.
An integrated approach to ensuring customer needs and value should be embedded in the product life cycle process, and can save your company (and your customers) millions of dollars in product development costs.
This is part of a short series on the common life data distributions.
The Normal distribution is a continuous distribution widely taught. It is commonly used to describe items, measurements, or time to failure data when there are many additive perturbations that comprise the results. This short article focuses on 7 formulas of the Normal Distribution.
If you want to know more about fitting a set of data to a distribution, well that is in another article.
It has the essential formulas that you may find useful when answering specific questions. Knowing a distribution’s set of parameters does provide, along with the right formulas, a quick means to answer a wide range of reliability related questions. [Read more…]
Reliability engineering includes delivering bad news. This piece of equipment will fail soon, this design won’t survive outdoor use.
We start early with engineering judgment on design weaknesses. Continue by organizing groups to evaluate and comment on what will likely fail. We test, prod, poke and force failures to occur. Then we tally the actual performance and compare that to the what we hoped.
We are the bearers of bad news all too often.
So how do you avoid the stigma attached to that bad news? [Read more…]
The analysis of telematics data with two or more parameters is a complex process. The analysis of multiple parameters using contour plots is a powerful tool since a lot of information is captured in the graphics.
The best results come from a team effort. For engineering data, the team may consist of the design/development engineers, a programmer, and a reliability engineer or a statistician. The following is an analysis of engine speed, engine torque, and the transmission gear state to describe the process.
We have executed and coached many projects. What benefit did they provide? Where can we help within the lifecycle of a project? Each section below contains a 2-minute video to expand on the case study topic provided. [Read more…]
One of the most common mistakes I see at plants and manufacturing facilities around the world is centered on the lack of a good lubrication program. For whatever reason, the task of lubricating equipment in most companies has been traditionally viewed as menial but necessary and delegated to low skill level employees with little or no training in lubrication best practices. It is this type of thinking that results in the unexpected failure of rotating equipment, including, pumps, motors, gearboxes, and bearings. Worse yet are the companies that have no lubrication program at all and somehow believe that someone in the plant will lubricate the equipment when it needs it. Just leave a few grease guns and some oil drums around the site and people will know when to add some. [Read more…]
What if an FMEA recommended action is redundant with the Design Controls? A reader makes this observation about an earlier article, and asks the question about the value of redundancy in FMEA.
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”
Eugene Ionesco
Wouldn’t it be great if we could require the stock market to provide us 15% increases in our portfolio every year…or if we could simply require a sunny day for a picnic?
You might be familiar with the term ‘market requirements’ or a ‘market requirements document’ as a deliverable in the definition phase of a product life cycle process. To understand why market requirements don’t really exist, we must first provide the definition of a requirement. [Read more…]
A topic that often comes up lately is high turnover, especially the perception that this is common and desirable among millennials. Born in the mid eighties, I am right on the cusp between millennial and Generation X, and I am one of the aforementioned employees with a high turnover history. A specialized Reliability Engineer with nearly ten years of work experience, I have rarely stayed with a company much over two years. I never intended to be a person who moved between companies so regularly, it just kind of happened. [Read more…]
Guest Post by Geary Sikich (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
We are enamored by risk models, mathematic algorithms, equations and formulae. As a matter of fact, we have become so enamored by complex mathematical algorithms, formulas, models and derivatives that we have abdicated much of the analysis of risk, to these complex formulas and quantitative analysis methodologies touted by firms far and wide. Where has this gotten us? Are we better able to predict and measure risk exposures? Are we managing risk more effectively? [Read more…]
Static electricity is the build-up of opposite polarity (positive and negative) electrical charges on two different substances in contact by the movement of one surface across the other. The spark that can occur from static build-up is the result of the opposite charges neutralising themselves when the electrical field between them becomes strong enough to overcome the gap resistance. [Read more…]
This is part of a short series on the common life data distributions.
The Lognormal distribution is a versatile and continuous distribution. It is similar to the Weibull in flexibility with just slightly fatter tails in most circumstances. It is commonly used to describe time to repair behavior. This short article focuses on 7 formulas of the Lognormal Distribution.
If you want to know more about fitting a set of data to a distribution, well that is in another article.
It has the essential formulas that you may find useful when answering specific questions. Knowing a distribution’s set of parameters does provide, along with the right formulas, a quick means to answer a wide range of reliability related questions. [Read more…]
An executive asked me how to make a “perfectly reliable product.”
I told him that program would look a lot like an embarrassing market failure that could put a company out of business.
This was not the response he was expecting. I chose to elaborate before he just walked away.
The investment of time, dollars, and man power to create a “perfectly” reliable product would force such a compromise on all other aspects of the product and program that any type of market success would almost be impossible. I can only think of two types of products that could benefit from an approach of creating perfect reliability. The two I am thinking of are the Mars Rover ‘Curiosity” and a nuclear power plant. The desire for “perfect reliability” would be driven by either an avoidance of massive loss of life (not just a few lives) or loss of billions of dollars by a single failure mode.