All articles listed in reverse chronological order.

3 Ways to Improve your Reliability Program

A Few Simple Ideas to Improve Your Reliability Program

Spending too much on reliability and not getting the results you expect? Just getting started and not sure where to focus your reliability program? Or, just looking for ways to improve your program?

There is not one way to build an effective reliability program. The variations in industries, expectations, technology, and the many constraints, shape each program. Here are three suggestions you can apply to any program at any time. These are not quick fix solutions, nor will you see immediate results, yet each will significantly improve your reliability program and help you achieve the results you and your customers expect. [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Effective Concurrent Engineering Reduces Producibility Risk

Guest Post by John Ayers (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Most companies have policies and procedures for concurrent engineering but many are ineffective for various reasons resulting in poor implementation of improved producibilty in their products. I have made this observation based on working for a variety of companies in different industries. Three examples of different approaches I encountered are presented below for your consideration. Two of the examples were used by defense companies, one of which I consider excellent and the other poor. One method was used by a commercial company is one I consider to be very good. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini 4 Comments

Bitumen Roadway Repairs

What you will learn from this article.

The life of a road depends on the vehicle wheel loading.
Aggregate size determines the strength of the tarmac.
The sub-base below the tarmac distributes wheel forces.
Slope the surface to prevent water pooling.

[Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 8 Comments

The Basics of Derating Electronic Components

As with strength-strength analysis, derating is a means to design robust systems.

Derating is an intentional process applied to every component of a product to reduce the opportunity of a component witnessing more stress than it is capable of withstanding.

The additional robustness also reduces the amount of damage the stress may impart, thus prolonging the life of the component. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 4 Comments

A Different Way to Consider Derating Guidelines

The component choice an electrical engineer starts with the functional requirements of the circuit. Another consideration is the rated values of the specific component selected.

Derating guidelines provide information to compare the component rated values to select stresses or conditions. The intent is to assist the engineering team to select robust enough components for the application.

Robust here implying the component within the circuit will operate for a suitable length of time. [Read more…]

by Tim Rodgers Leave a Comment

Subcontracting Quality

It’s hard enough to get people to focus on quality when their company’s name is on the product.

It’s even more challenging when the design and/or manufacturing of the product is outsourced. How do you effectively manage product quality indirectly through suppliers and subcontractors?

[Read more…]

by nomtbf Leave a Comment

5 Clues Using MTBF is Not Helping

Have you ever heard the claim that “We use MTBF, as it’s working just fine”?

They may be profitable and successful in the marketplace. Is MTBF serving them well?

Probably not. [Read more…]

by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Developing A Strategy To Achieve Excellence In Maintenance

Welcome to my latest 10-part series of blogs called “Uptime Insights”, where we explore a journey of excellence in maintenance. To stay on top, managers must implement strategies that keep operations performing at high levels. In these articles I will show you how to achieve excellence in maintenance – a critical business process in any capital intensive industry. [Read more…]

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Tyre and Trunnion Wear

Roll mills, drum dryers, kilns, ball mills and rotating reactors usually turn on metal tyres and trunnion rollers.

Eventually, the tyres and rollers wear out or fatigue and require repair or replacement.

Usually, the equipment manufacturers keep material specifications as proprietary information and one is forced to buy the parts from them. [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Risk Based Decision Making

Guest Post by Ed Perkins (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Risk-based decision making is employed to implement risk management.

But how is this implemented? In this article, we will look at the process of making “risk-based” decisions.

Risk management is a process that involves several activities: [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Today You Have CRE Preparation Options

The ASQ CRE Exam is daunting.

While you may desire to become certified, you also know the CRE body of knowledge is broad. The exam is 150 questions in four hours that may tax your ability to achieve a passing score.

There is a lot to know in reliability engineering. Your journey of learning really never ends. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Data Q&A with Fred and James

A Question & Answer Period with Fred Schenkelberg and James Kovacevic on the what can be done with your data and analysis.

Data and the analyses that use the data can be tricky to manage at best, let along extremely difficult.

In this last post of the series on using the maintenance data you have, Fred and James will answer many of the common questions asked about data and the analyses. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 1 Comment

3 Ways to Provide Field Reliability Feedback to the Design Team

By the time a product fails in the field, the design team is focused on the next design.

They are looking to the future and not looking for field reliability feedback. We know that each failure contains valuable information.

We, as reliability professionals, often work to create as much useful information concerning failure modes and mechanisms as possible. We want to improve the design.

Yet, what happens when the design team has moved on to the next project? When the expertise to effectively make changes to the design to improve product reliability performance is no longer paid to work on the previous design?

What can you do to engage the right people to implement the necessary changes?

Here are a few ideas that I’ve seen used to effectively make good use of field failures to create meaningful field reliability feedback. [Read more…]

by nomtbf Leave a Comment

What is Reliability?

Guest Post by Martin Shaw

In today’s complex product environment becoming more and more electronic, do the designers and manufacturers really understand what IS Reliability ??

It is NOT simply following standards to test in RD to focus only on Design Robustness as there is too much risk in prediction confidence, it only deals with the ‘intrinsic’ failure period and rarely has sufficient Test Strength to stimulate failures. [Read more…]

by Tim Rodgers Leave a Comment

Design Limited Quality

When I joined Hewlett-Packard in 1988, I was assigned to a team that was working on a design for manufacturability manual for printed circuit board designers.

Our primary objective was to provide performance and cost information that could be used to guide decisions about different design options.

My favorite project during that time was a predictive model to estimate the manufacturing yield of a PCB design based on a composite “complexity” metric.

Because we were an internal supplier, I was able to look at the actual lot yields for hundreds of active part numbers with known design parameters, so it seemed like a fairly straightforward exercise to experiment with different regression models to find an optimum fit between complexity and yield.

[Read more…]