Is MTBF Preventing Your Product From Being Reliable?

MTBF is not reliability. Attaining a specific MTBF does not mean your product is reliable. MTBF use may be the culprit.

Therefore, working to achieve a MTBF value may actually be preventing you from creating a product that mets your customer’s reliability performance expectations.

Actively working to achieve MTBF using the common tools around MTBF may be taking you and your team down the wrong rabbit hole. You may be working to reduce the reliability of your products rather than improving them.

Let’s take a look at a couple of ways the pursuit of MTBF is harmful to your product’s reliability potential and contrary to your customer’s expectations. [Read more…]

Let me ask you something concerning MTBF

Do make compromises around gathering and analyzing data since you only need to report MTBF?

Do you use MTBF (exponential distribution) based test planning when you know the product has a non-constant hazard rate?

These questions came up this week via email looking for advice when directed to ignore the actual situation and just do what the customer wants.

I’m traveling this week, rather jet-lagged today, so going to keep this one short.

How would you answer these questions? What advice would you give someone using exponential based reporting, test planning, or data analysis approaches knowing the customer expects that process yet the data and your experience suggest you should use another method  (Weibull or MCF, for example)?

Please add you comments below and let’s prepare a list of what one should say or use to respond to such actions.

 

What are the Other Challenges in Reliability

Creating a product or system that lasts as long as expected, or longer, is a challenge.

It’s a common challenge that reliability engineering and entire engineering team face on a regular basis. It’s also not our only challenge.

We face and solve a myriad of technical, political, and engineering challenges. Some of our challenges are born and carried forward by our own industry. We have tools suitable for a given purpose altered to ‘fit’ another situation (inappropriately and creating misleading results). We have terms that we, and our peers, struggle to understand.

Sometimes, we, as reliability engineers have set up challenges that thwart our best efforts to make progress.

Let’s examine a few of the self made challenges and discuss ways to overcome these obstacles permitting us to tackle the real hurdles in our path. [Read more…]