Some time ago when talking with someone I just met, the conversation turned to what we did for a living. I mentioned being a reliability engineer, and his response: “Oh, yes, we do reliability”. Curious, as I’m not sure that I ‘do reliability’, we then talked about what he meant.

The conversation revealed that they had a list of tasks that they accomplished for each product under development. They did tests and reviews of the results. A lot of testing. They did FMEA and HALT. He believed the engineers did derating or stress/strength calculation. He didn’t know about process stability with vendors or internal manufacturing lines.

They did stuff, which meant they did reliability.

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Some time ago, earlier in my career, I worked for a wonderful boss. She would stop by my office on occasion and ask ‘what’s new?’ or “how’s it going?’ Just a check-in. I often let her know about the current vexing problem I was struggling with at the moment.

The funny thing is she never directly solve the problem for me. She certainly could have. Instead, she would ask a couple of questions that always helped me to find the solution. This happened with problems concerning dealing with a difficult person, strange material properties, motivating change within a group, or finding someone that could design and run a computational fluid dynamic model for me.

It was her questions the helped. She did this in meetings, in presentations, and when she swung by my office for a chat. [Read more…]

In a recent blog post, Seth Goin discussed the need for ongoing investment to maintain infrastructure. Whether a road or building or even your own skills, it takes regular care to avoid system failures or obsolesce. [Read more…]

Statistical process control, SPC, is a set of tools to enable monitoring the stability of a process. SPC is also the first step to checking process capability with measures such as Cpk. Many consider SPC a quality or manufacturing tool. Yet, having and maintaining a stable process is also essential to creating a reliable product. Let me explain why. [Read more…]

Very few reliability decisions are made by reliability engineers. Yet, reliability engineers are asked many questions concerning reliability. How reliable will this design be for customers? How will the system likely fail? How many failures should we expect next month?

How you answer these and the many other questions received does impact the reliability of your product or system. The information provided those that ask reliability related questions, with useful and practical information, can make better decisions which improves reliability performance.

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An immediate purpose is to earn a living. You also may suggest the work is to improve the reliability of the product or system. Reduce downtime, reduce warranty, increase profit, etc.

That is fine for the overall purpose of reliability engineering work, yet in the day to day work, the specific task level, what is the purpose behind what we do?

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