Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Chris and Fred discuss the organizations that culturally avoid engineering. Those organizations that for some reason, never ask for the data, the math, the tests, the thinking or anything else that might actually help you understand why your thing fails.
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Chris and Fred discuss when you should run qualification tests again. A qualification test can be anything – essentially all your product, system or service has to do is meet or exceed something to get a tick in the box. So if you make a minor change to your system – do you need to run all your qualification tests again? Can you get away with not doing any? Listen to this podcast to learn more!
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Chris and Fred discuss what it means to have confidence in something. Confidence can mean all things to all people. How confident are you as a person? How confident are you in someone else? What confidence do you have in a conclusion? Statisticians and reliability engineers need to talk to each other where the term confidence has a clearly defined and fixed meaning. But does it? How confident are you in the results of a test? How confident are you in a test that has 75 data points versus one that has 70? How confident will your boss be in you when you present the outcomes of these tests? Have these tests shaken YOUR confidence? Best you listen to this podcast.
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Some of you may have heard of ‘Bayesian analysis.’ You may think this is something fancy that only universities do. Or something we never do because it is all about ‘best guesses.’ Well … neither of these things are true.
Why would you be interested in Bayesian analysis? Simple. It allows you to use EVERY PIECE OF INFORMATION you have. This can be expert judgment. Or it can be test data on a similar ‘thing.’ Or it could be combining test data for one part of your ‘thing’ combined with test data for ‘all of your thing.’ [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss the typical decisions that are informed by reliability. It might be easier to list what decisions are not informed by reliability engineering. We came up with a list of 13 … and that is only because we ran out of time. What decisions you think are influenced by reliability engineering? Listen to this podcast to learn more.
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Chris and Fred discuss different strategies for reliability. We start with a couple of strategies that don’t work (big shout out to virtually every military customer … ever!) and then come up with some approaches that have been shown to work – at least in some circumstances. And that is the key – different scenarios demand different strategies. Sound interesting? Then this is the podcast for you.
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If reliability engineering ends up costing you money, then you are doing it wrong. But chances are that someone you work for looks at reliability engineering as a black hole of costs. This needs to stop!
Reliability engineering is about creating value. Or money. Or more missions. Or safety. But you need to show how this will happen. [Read more…]
Chris and Carl discuss reliability management.
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Ever wondered if your servicing intervals are ‘good’? Do you know what ‘good’ is? Are you servicing too much or too little? What happens if you service too much? Do you use some basic equations in textbooks and plug in numbers which seem too simple and basic AND you don’t understand them (all at the same time)?
If you have asked yourselves any of these questions, then this is the webinar for you. A really simple, never done this before, please join me in the discussion on what it actually means to optimize servicing intervals. [Read more…]
This is our fifth article about the 3 ways to do reliability allocation. We have been taken on a journey through the reliability design cycle, key steps for reliability allocation, allocation factors used to get these goals and key pitfalls. Now we finish off our conversation by looking at a few variations and applications. Allocating MTBF (… though we recommend against it), allocating availability, allocating maintainability (… another thing we recommend against) and allocating for different system reliability goals.
If you want to finish off your understanding of reliability allocation – read this!
Chris and Fred discuss what a leader, champion and manager are. Many textbooks, guidebooks and so-called ‘domain experts’ tell us what (for example) a ‘reliability leader’ is. In some cases the ‘reliability leader’ is someone who has little influence, and is more of an ad hoc ‘doer.’ Not a leader. Why is this? Listen to this podcast to hear more about this?
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Chris and Fred discuss assumptions – and when you need to check if they are valid. And if you do need to … how do you check these assumptions? Reliability (and all sorts of other engineers) need to study variation and variance. We are often interested in when the first ‘5 percent’ of things will fail. So assumptions on the underlying failure (or random) process are crucial. Sound familiar? Listen to this podcast to learn more.
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This is our fourth article about the 3 ways to do reliability allocation. The first three articles describe the reliability design cycle and how reliability allocation is a part of this cycle. Our last article focused on what options you, as a design team leader, have at your disposal when you realize that your components aren’t on track to meet their allocated goals (or doing something!) Now we talk about working out what these allocated goals are. And how to get them. And don’t worry – it is much easier than you probably think!
If you want to learn more about a straightforward approach to reliability allocation – read this!
Ok. They say there are lies, damn lies and statistics. And at the heart of statistics are these intimidating functions like ‘probability density functions’ and ‘cumulative distribution functions.’
They mean something – but are practically useless unless they help inform a decision. And we as engineers are supposed to know what these functions mean. But have you ever sat in a meeting or presentation where you realized there were some gaps in your knowledge? … or perhaps you felt like you were given too many charts but not enough help to make your decision?
If you want a really easy introduction or review of these functions – then check out this webinar!
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Chris and Fred discuss how we need to estimate monthly failure rates of a product. Like when bosses or directors want to know what the ‘failure’ or ‘return’ rate of a product is this month. But is this useful? How do we account for the number of products we have shipped? How old are the products when they fail? And how do we learn from these numbers? Can we even find a number? Listen to this podcast to learn more.
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