Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
We have data. Often an abundance of data concerning equipment failures. Failures per month or MTBF type measures do not reveal sufficient insights to understand the pattern of failures.
A good plot reveals the data’s story.
Repairable system data is what is called by statisticians a renewal process.
The repair activity may restore the system to as good as new. Sometimes, the repair pretty much leaves the system in a state similar to just before the repair.
What happens most often, though, is the chance of system failure changes after each repair activity.
A simple plot can help us see what is happening. [Read more…]
Warranty is a part of doing business. Warranty management is not just the terms listed on the box.
Understanding the entire warranty process, along with your options, permits you to manage your warranty, rather than the other way around.
This is a short overview.
Pieces of a warranty program occur well before the first product ships and may affect the company bottom line for years after you ship your last product.
Brand promise, marketing, finance, customer service are not common areas for a reliability engineer.
Yet, the impact of product failures tends to dominant warranty expenses.
Therefore understanding the many elements around warranty management is essential for any reliability engineer. [Read more…]
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve received the same question a few times.
The CRE exam is perceived as a daunting task. One worth preparing well to be successful.
How do you prepare? What should you do to best prepare?
Let’s explore a few hints and tips that have been previously discussed here. [Read more…]
Upon my son’s return from studying abroad for a semester, I asked him what he learned. He said there are a lot of smart people in the world.
I concur. [Read more…]
The offered warranty is an internal part of many purchase decisions, plus many business models.
While obligatory to offer a warranty, especially for consumer products, the specific terms, duration, and eventual total cost of honoring warranty claims may vary dramatically.
One key to managing the overall warranty expense is to estimate the potential future warranty claims, followed by accurately tracking actual expenses during the warranty period. [Read more…]
During the design phase, we make decisions that create the eventual reliability performance of a product.
It is the decisions we make that matter.
Also during the design phase, we explore numerous questions. [Read more…]
We often have more data than we can to use. For time to failure, warranty claims, and related field data, we should take the time to learn what we can. Let’s explore organizing your field data and use basic techniques let the data speak.
We’ve collected data and it’s time for the analysis.
As you may recall, in the last article on Planning a Taguchi L4 Array Experiment, we drafted a set of four prototypes. The specific arrangement of factors and levels will now allow us to analyze each factor separately.
The intent is to find the optimal level or setting for each factor, plus which is the most important factor. [Read more…]
In deciding what industry you want to work as a reliability engineer, it is always good to have an understanding of what functional responsibilities you are expected to execute as a part of the job function.
You should always carefully review the job description then compare your knowledge acquired through training and on-the-job experience and ask yourself if you are capable of performing functions required without additional training.
Furthermore, we need to consider our technical limitations and at the same time be aware that the job description provided may not exclusive represents all the tasks you are expected to perform. [Read more…]
Tim and Fred discuss the tendency to look for quick answers when analyzing quality failures, often overlooking the true root cause which may have more to do with internal culture.
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One of the simplest ways to learn design of experiments, DOE, is to just give it a try.
The Taguchi DOE approach uses orthogonal arrays. This subset of the possible approaches to DOE simplifies the process to create and analyze experiments.
Let’s plan a simple experiment using the Taguchi DOE approach. [Read more…]
It’s been almost a year since launching Accendo Reliability. It’s been fun, exciting, and weekly.
Love it and really enjoy helping you answer questions, get stuff done, and master reliability engineering.
Since my wife and I just bought a house (out playing Pokemon Go when we stopped for an open house – and a week later our offer was accepted). Now we’re preparing to move ourselves to our new home.
There is a lot involved. [Read more…]
When we understand how something fails, we can create a mathematical model of the effect of stress or load on the time to failure behavior.
The model may take different forms, yet it is the ability to related the conditions surrounding the use of a device to its eventual demise that is essential. The specifics include a molecular level of detail in some cases.
Physics of Failure models focus on the particular relationships between stresses and materials. [Read more…]
