Accendo Reliability

Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site

All articles listed in reverse chronological order.

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How to Spot Reliability-Minded Coworkers

How to Spot Reliability-Minded Coworkers

Being the reliability engineer on a project doesn’t have to be a lonely assignment.

Nearly everyone on the team shares the same goal. That of creating a reliable product or maintaining equipment availability.

Other may be electrical or mechanical engineers, technicians, procurement or some other part of the organization, yet they all have something to contribute to improving reliability.

Sometimes you have to find the reliability-minded individuals – to assist when gathering information – to identify potential weaknesses – to provide support for a reliability task – to encourage others to fully consider reliability with each decision [Read more…]

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Creating Reliability Champions

Creating Reliability Champions

How do you find, encourage and develop reliability professionals across your organization? We all face the challenge of creating a culture of reliability within an organization at some point in our careers.

Do so alone is nearly impossible.

You need support. You need more hands and minds that can spot reliability opportunities. You need to be in dozens of conversations per hour across the organization.

This is difficult for one person to accomplish.

[Read more…]

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14 Ways to Acquire Reliability Engineering Knowledge

14 Ways to Acquire Reliability Engineering Knowledge

Maria Popova recently wrote about the work of James T. Mangan and his book You Can Do Anything!, published in 1936. In particular she focused on one section titled 14 Ways to Acquire Knowledge

The article is about learning anything, which had me thinking about how to learn reliability engineering. So, without apology let’s explore 14 ways to learn about reliability engineering. [Read more…]

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10 Steps of FMEA

10 Steps of FMEA

In Chapter 8 of The Basics of FMEA by Robin E. McDermott, et. al. discusses the ten steps for an FMEA. I find it to be an excellent summary for describing and conducting a failure mode and effect analysis.

Therefore based on the work of McDermott and others, plus my own experience here are the ten steps with my descriptions. [Read more…]

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Basics of Reliability Engineering

Basics of Reliability Engineering

One of best features about working in reliability engineering is everything fails, eventually. This fact provides a bit of career stability.

Another aspect I enjoy is the concepts and approaches that create the foundation for reliability engineering knowledge do not change very much over time. The basics of reliability engineering are the same as when the earliest engineers began design structures and products.

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How to calculate MTTF

A Question and my Response on MTTF

So this corrosion engineers walks into NoMTBF and send me a message.

The Questions

Hi, I am corrosion engineer. May be you know for risk assessment of heat ex-changer tube bundle in API-581 , mean time to failure (MTTF) term is defined and used for risk assessment.

Would you please give me more information about MTTF and what history data required to calculate MTTF?

Thank u so much

My Response

[Read more…]

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How to Read a Standard Normal Table

How to Read a Standard Normal Table

One of the most basic skills needed for the CRE exam is the ability to correctly read the Standard Normal Table.

Writing this short how-to article would be really easy if there were only one way to create the table. There isn’t. It seems every author has to create a unique way to tabulate the values. [Read more…]

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3 Ideas to Overcome Organizational Inertia

3 Ideas to Overcome Organizational Inertia

It seems the forces of nature are working against our ideas.

I recall being frustrated as a child playing in the sandbox. I wanted to create a ramp of sand to race my cars down. No matter how much I pushed and patted the dry sand succumbed to some unseen force and did not hold the desired shape.

In business, we sometimes experience the same frustration. It’s not gravity.

Instead, we are facing organizational inertia.

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Role of Reliability in an Organization

Role of Reliability in an Organization

An effective product reliability process requires a strong team, at every level.

The team of employees within an organization that participate and impact product reliability is a vast and widespread group of people. They include members of the design team, design managers, quality and reliability engineers and managers, procurement engineers and managers, warranty managers, failure analysis specialists, members of the marketing and sales staff, members of the finance and manufacturing teams, and field service and call center staffs. [Read more…]

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11 Ways to Find Reliability Value

11 Ways to Find Reliability Value

Most agree that improving products or process reliability is a good thing. It’s good for customers, factories, and our business.

And, sometimes it’s difficult to answer the question,

What is the value of that reliability activity?

Years ago my boss asked me what value I provided the organization. Working as a reliability professional, I thought that my value was obvious. He asked me to show the value.

It was harder than I thought.

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Normal Distribution PDF

This is a work in progress and – needs work.

[WolframCDF source=”http://nomtbf.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Normal-PDF.cdf” width=”625″ height=”1500″ altimage=”http://nomtbf.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Normal-PDF.pdf” altimagewidth=”625″ altimageheight=”1500″]