Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Chris and Fred discuss what you need to think about when selecting your next reliability engineering course. What course do you need to do to become a better engineer (and more valuable to your organization)?
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Chris and Fred discuss what came first … reliability or statistics? Reliability of course! There are plenty of organizations that focus on baking reliability into designs without the need for statistics. But statistics are a part of reliability engineering. So what is the relationship between the two? Listen to this podcast to learn more.
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Reliability engineering has an image problem. It is seen as an imbugerance that destroys budget, schedule and fun. People sometimes think reliability engineering is simply statistics, data analysis and other mind-numbing stuff. Reliability purgatory. Which brings us to the first reason you need to do reliability engineering.
#1 – Reliability engineering is not reliability purgatory. Reliability purgatory is all effort and no outcomes. Reliability happens at the point of decision. Design decisions. Manufacturing decisions. Maintenance decisions. True reliability engineering helps you make better decisions – which often comes down to organized judgment and not statistics.
A recent student of mine was an engineer for a rail corporation. Let’s call her Liz. Liz kept asking me ‘what do I need to put in a contract’ to make sure my suppliers take reliability seriously? She kept asking this over, and over, until I got the penny to drop. Liz eventually realized that she was the one who had to take it seriously. [Read more…]
Reliability engineers LOVE Weibull plots. They often make sense out of a bunch of seemingly random points. Or at least we feel like they make sense. Anything that turns a bunch of random points into a straight line is automatically making sense … right? Wrong. It is up to us as reliability engineers to look at Weibull plots and work out what is going on. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss the apparent differences between what you find in textbooks and what you are supposed to do when it comes to good reliability engineering.
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Remember how we were told as kids in school that we had to study hard to get into college or university? There was that ongoing, implied threat that not getting into university or college would ruin our career. Or at least, be very bad.
It turns out it may not be that bad after all. For example, over half of Apple’s employees don’t have 4-year degrees. Why? [Read more…]
Every organization needs to be able to explain ‘why’ it is here. In fact, an organization’s ‘why’ is . Check out Simon Sinek. One of his favourite phrases is that ‘people don’t buy what you do – they buy why you do it.’
People buy Apple products because of they enjoy how they interface with devices that are part of a bigger and seamless ecosystem. All their competitors try to emulate this. Amazon is all about customer experience. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss what warranty and reliability mean for each other. They sounds like very related topics or ideas. But are they? Listen to this podcast to learn more.
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Chris and Fred discuss what the idea of ‘6 sigma’ means for reliability. What is ‘6 sigma?’ Is it a buzzword? There are lots of different ideas on what ‘6 sigma’ is. We are always on the look out for amazing new things that are going to help us do reliability stuff. Want to learn more? Listen to this podcast.
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We all know that all you need to work out how many spare parts you need is to put some numbers into a computer, perhaps throw in a ‘confidence’ level as well, and use the number that the computer spits back out at you. Right? [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss the roles assumption play in reliability. Assumptions can be very useful … or very dangerous. Why? Because assumptions are information. If they are based on nothing, then assumptions become misinformation. Which means you make the wrong decision. Listen to this podcast to learn more!
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Chris and Fred discuss how we confirm the reliability of something we are making. Or maintaining. Or managing. This is in response to someone raising a question regarding reliability allocation – based on an Accendo webinar. And the question was all about working out how to test that we are on track to meet goals allocated to subsystems and components. So what do we do? Well listen to this podcast!
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Chris and Fred discuss ‘why’ leadership. Not why leadership is important (we know it is). But the sort of leadership that focuses on the ‘why’ of an organization or group of people. ‘Why’ people who work at these organizations get out of bed in the morning. ‘Why’ customers purchase products or services from an organization. And if we get the ‘why’ right … everything becomes a lot easier. Especially reliability.
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Chris and Fred discuss ‘Problem #5.’ What is problem #5? Well … technically it isn’t a problem at all. Which is what we want to be doing as reliability engineers. Preventing problems from occurring. Most people look at reliability engineers as (perhaps at best) addressing field failures or failures in the hands of the customers. But reliability engineering is much more valuable than that. Reliability engineering prevents you from not meeting budget or not achieving scheduled milestones. In fact … field failures (which are what we call ‘Problem #1’) are incidental to good reliability engineering. Want to learn more?
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