Accendo Reliability

Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site

  • Home
  • About
    • Contributors
  • Reliability.fm
    • Speaking Of Reliability
    • Rooted in Reliability: The Plant Performance Podcast
    • Quality during Design
    • Way of the Quality Warrior
    • Critical Talks
    • Dare to Know
    • Maintenance Disrupted
    • Metal Conversations
    • The Leadership Connection
    • Practical Reliability Podcast
    • Reliability Matters
    • Reliability it Matters
    • Maintenance Mavericks Podcast
    • Women in Maintenance
    • Accendo Reliability Webinar Series
  • Articles
    • CRE Preparation Notes
    • on Leadership & Career
      • Advanced Engineering Culture
      • Engineering Leadership
      • Managing in the 2000s
      • Product Development and Process Improvement
    • on Maintenance Reliability
      • Aasan Asset Management
      • AI & Predictive Maintenance
      • Asset Management in the Mining Industry
      • CMMS and Reliability
      • Conscious Asset
      • EAM & CMMS
      • Everyday RCM
      • History of Maintenance Management
      • Life Cycle Asset Management
      • Maintenance and Reliability
      • Maintenance Management
      • Plant Maintenance
      • Process Plant Reliability Engineering
      • ReliabilityXperience
      • RCM Blitz®
      • Rob’s Reliability Project
      • The Intelligent Transformer Blog
      • The People Side of Maintenance
      • The Reliability Mindset
    • on Product Reliability
      • Accelerated Reliability
      • Achieving the Benefits of Reliability
      • Apex Ridge
      • Metals Engineering and Product Reliability
      • Musings on Reliability and Maintenance Topics
      • Product Validation
      • Reliability Engineering Insights
      • Reliability in Emerging Technology
    • on Risk & Safety
      • CERM® Risk Insights
      • Equipment Risk and Reliability in Downhole Applications
      • Operational Risk Process Safety
    • on Systems Thinking
      • Communicating with FINESSE
      • The RCA
    • on Tools & Techniques
      • Big Data & Analytics
      • Experimental Design for NPD
      • Innovative Thinking in Reliability and Durability
      • Inside and Beyond HALT
      • Inside FMEA
      • Integral Concepts
      • Learning from Failures
      • Progress in Field Reliability?
      • R for Engineering
      • Reliability Engineering Using Python
      • Reliability Reflections
      • Testing 1 2 3
      • The Manufacturing Academy
  • eBooks
  • Resources
    • Accendo Authors
    • FMEA Resources
    • Feed Forward Publications
    • Openings
    • Books
    • Webinars
    • Journals
    • Higher Education
    • Podcasts
  • Courses
    • 14 Ways to Acquire Reliability Engineering Knowledge
    • Reliability Analysis Methods online course
    • Measurement System Assessment
    • SPC-Process Capability Course
    • Design of Experiments
    • Foundations of RCM online course
    • Quality during Design Journey
    • Reliability Engineering Statistics
    • Quality Engineering Statistics
    • An Introduction to Reliability Engineering
    • Reliability Engineering for Heavy Industry
    • An Introduction to Quality Engineering
    • Process Capability Analysis course
    • Root Cause Analysis and the 8D Corrective Action Process course
    • Return on Investment online course
    • CRE Preparation Online Course
    • Quondam Courses
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming Live Events
  • Calendar
    • Call for Papers Listing
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • Webinar Calendar
  • Login
    • Member Home

by Adam Bahret Leave a Comment

Improving Reliability with a CM

Improving Reliability with a CM

Many product development teams use a contract manufacturer (CM) to develop and manufacture their product. It’s the “develop” term that has limitations that may be unforeseen when engaging.  Many companies use the CM to assist or even eventually entirely execute the product development.  This can have great results or be problematic.  But let’s talk about the arrangements that work well.  Troublesome CM’s are a topic for a different time.

For a company heavily engaged with a CM in the design process an interest in improving reliability may be challenging. They may discover that they don’t have a lot of knowledge or control of the details of the design.  What are the materials used?  What is being controlled in manufacturing and how much?  To improve reliability, or even start a program from scratch, it is important to be able to characterize many aspects of the product and the variabilities that exist.  Reliability is the “study of product response to variability.” Variability to environment, variability to use, and variability in manufacturing.

The first step is to investigate how well the CM can be included in this initiative.  By having them contribute to the design process they are an official part of the reliability team. Create the following check list of information to gather before starting the reliability initiative

  • What is the reliability goal and what is driving it?
  • Will there be any feature adds to the product in the improved reliability revision?
  • Who controls the variabilities of design features and manufacturing controls?  Are you sure?
  • What studies have been completed on “use-cases” and “environment”?

The key is having these discussions with the CM so they can contribute as designers, researching what info exists and doing all of this up front.

-Adam

 

Filed Under: Apex Ridge, Articles, on Product Reliability

About Adam Bahret

I am a Reliability engineer with over 20 years of experience in mechanical and electrical systems in many industries. I founded Apex Ridge Reliability as a firm to assist technology companies with the critical reliability steps in their product development programs and organizational culture.

« Quality & Reliability: Similarities and Differences
How to Estimate the Number of Failures Next Month »

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Article by Adam Bahret
in the Apex Ridge series

Join Accendo

Receive information and updates about articles and many other resources offered by Accendo Reliability by becoming a member.

It’s free and only takes a minute.

Join Today

Recent Articles

  • test
  • test
  • test
  • Your Most Important Business Equation
  • Your Suppliers Can Be a Risk to Your Project

© 2025 FMS Reliability · Privacy Policy · Terms of Service · Cookies Policy