Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
This is the fourth in our webinar series, ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ We have examined how to turn data points (like the different failure points of devices under test) into something simple, useful, and sometimes beautiful! This is something that commercial software can’t do. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss what performance actually means. When it comes to reliability engineering … is this simply having fewer failures? NO! There is plenty more to reliability engineering than simply taking a ‘thing’ and simply making it work for longer. How can reliability engineering make more appealing, more functional, and less expensive products? Listen to this podcast for more!
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Chris and Fred discuss how we use standards for reliability engineering, safety, and other similar fields. Standards have a place in everything we do. But issues come when we stop thinking about the thing we are creating and rely on the standards to guide really important decisions. Why is this silly? Listen to the podcast!
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This is the third in our webinar series ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ The first webinar showed what it means to turn reliability data into something a decision-maker can use. Not a chart. Not a graph. Not a ‘p’ value. Not anything else that you find in a textbook but isn’t useful. Last month’s webinar talked about how the best way to do this is to use computers … but in an easy way! And we talked about creating a ‘posse’ of possible ‘ways’ to explain the data we see. And this webinar is about how we use this thing called Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulation (MCMC) to create this ‘posse.’ And the ‘posse’ isn’t random … it is based on the ‘likelihood’ of each one being the correct one, which is how MCMC works. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss what a ‘body of knowledge’ or ‘BOK’ should do? And by this we mean a document or book that outlines the key ideas or things you should know for doing ‘something’ … like reliability. There are many textbooks which are (let’s face it) not helpful because they are ‘too technical’ – and not useful for the majority of reliability decisions. But we can go too far the other way as well and make things too simple – so we just plug and play tools. Without knowing what each tool does. Sound familiar? Listen to this podcast!
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Chris and Fred discuss the urge for (us) reliability engineers to rush to use a tool – and not understand what that tool does, how it works, or even if it answers the question you are trying to answer. Why is this? We sometimes (always) like solving problems. But in our rush to solve a problem … do we solve the right problem? Do we create more problems? What’s a ‘problem?’ Sound familiar or scary? Listen to this podcast.
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Last month’s webinar was ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ And we showed how to slightly ‘tweak’ all those textbook reliability analyses into USEFUL ACTIVITIES. What good is a 90 % confidence bound on reliability? What does this mean for profit? Or fleet size? Or mission success? We solved this problem by identifying the ‘likely’ ways we can explain our data. In fact – there is a whole bunch of statistics on creating the ‘likelihood’ of an explanation of what we see. We use this ‘likelihood’ in most statistical applications – including those USEFUL ACTIVITIES we discussed above. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss the age-old problem of ‘influence’ or lack thereof when you are a small buyer. Influence to get reliable components. Influence to have that supplier remedy your issues. Because you feel too small and insignificant. Sound familiar? Then listen to this podcast.
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Chris and Fred discuss the idea of timing how long you spend talking about ‘reliability engineering.’ And by this, we mean conversation where you (1) proactively talking about preventing failures before they occur, and (2) in a way where something gets done about it (improving something)? Let’s say someone timed how much time your organization spent on this sort of conversation – would you be proud of the number you get?
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Chris and Fred talk about accelerated life testing or ALT. Well before we start, we need to work out what the decision we are informing is. Want to learn more? Listen to this podcast.
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Let’s say that you have some ‘reliability guys’ do some reliability analysis on reliability data … and they give you some numbers. Or a plot. Or a curve. Perhaps you are the reliability guy … and you do the analysis – and then what? [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss how you can influence behavior. Good behavior. Like taking reliability seriously. It is not about what you say when you are forced to say it. It is about what you like saying and what you make your people do. So there are some things you can do to influence people in a good way. But it takes some effort on your behalf. Keen to learn more? Listen here!
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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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