Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Short essays and thoughts (musings) on reliability and maintenance engineering topics.
Let me know your reaction and thought, plus any questions.
ISSN 2329-0080
Reliability is not the sole responsibility of the reliability engineer but results from nearly everyone in an organization making decisions that move toward the desired product reliability performance.
As a reliability professional, I often find it necessary to explore ways to leverage my knowledge of these areas to change the culture within an organization to create a sustainable program that achieves reliable products time and again. [Read more…]
Early in my career, I worked for an unreasonable person.
He wanted us, his engineering staff, to show him the data. He wanted us to gather, monitor, analyze and display data regularly. Anytime we needed approval, funding, or resources he wanted to see the data. [Read more…]
Reliability is not the only concern when building a system.
Let’s consider a passenger car. Reliability refers to how often the car in the shop. How often we need to perform preventative or corrective maintenance. How often it fails. [Read more…]
Let’s say you run across a lightweight, inexpensive, easy to manufacture metal that you are considering for a new bike frame. Beyond the functional considerations of strength, size, and finish options what else do you consider?
Is it durable? If it fails how does it fail (a shattering a bicycle frame would not be good, for example). You may also consider how the bicycle will be used and stored. What stress will the frame experience over its lifetime? [Read more…]
Early in my career the engineering manager relished discovering equipment failure.
It didn’t matter if it was human, electronic, mechanical or software in nature, the glint in his eye soon gave way to a flood of possibilities. He enjoyed the process of investigating the fundamental reasons a failure occurred. [Read more…]
Lately, I’ve seen some evidence of reliability engineers giving up.
Throwing in the towel. Going with the flow. Not rocking the boat.
Is that our charter? To roll over and accept that we cannot make a difference?
No, it’s not. [Read more…]
Or, how to master the body of knowledge and be an effective reliability engineer.
Yes, there is a lot to know concerning reliability engineering. You should have a firm grasp of statistics, modeling, laboratory and experimental procedures, failure analysis skills, and more. [Read more…]
You may have been tapped one morning and given the assignment. You may have pursued the role either via a university program or by simply applying for the position.
Now what? How do you start in this role? What are you expected to do? [Read more…]
A common and poor technique to gather field data is to count the number of returns by week or month. This can provide a graph showing the number of returns over time.
It hides information you need to understand your field failures.
Let’s take a look at a way to gather the same field failure data and retain the critical information necessary for time to failure analysis. [Read more…]
Fielded products fail day by day. Customers report these failures generally seeking a way to remedy this issue. Gathering the reported or returned products or confirmed failures is common practice.
Depending on the product a simple replacement or exchange may suffice. For other products, repair or a refund may be appropriate.
In general, and not always, when a product fails in the hands of a customer, the organization designing, manufacturing and distributing the product learns of the failure. [Read more…]
On occasion, you and the team sit down to review the design.
The idea is to check the design for any issues with the combined wisdom of the people involved. Or, it may be a status update for the entire team providing a focus on the most important issues and action items.
The review may involve all departments, such as marketing, operations, supplier management, and the design team.
It may involve just you and the electrical engineer in a private meeting. In either case, it is a review and a chance to illuminate salient reliability issues and form a consensus on the appropriate action. [Read more…]
A plan is a guide or roadmap for intended action.
A reliability plan is also a collection of specific tasks and milestones and enhanced with a rationale to allow the entire team fully understand their role accomplishing the reliability objectives.
The plan is a way to achieve the desired business objectives. Meaning the product is reliable enough to meet customer expectations, minimize warranty expenses, and garner market acceptance. The plan is just a plan, it is the accomplishment of the tasks, the decision which improves the design, the signals monitored that stabilize the supply chain and assembly process, that make the difference.
A plan without action is not worth the effort. [Read more…]
Do you have one in your organization? Is it used regularly?
If not, your organization’s products are likely not as reliable as they should be. You are shipping products that are not as robust nor reliable as your customers deserve.
Derating and Safety Factors, defined earlier, provide a means to select components or create design features that have sufficient margin to accommodate variation in use and strength over time.
So why are these tools routinely ignored or given only fleeting attention? [Read more…]
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measurable values related to essential business objectives.
A KPI provides a means to monitor the performance of a specific function.
In larger organizations, with sales & marketing, research & development, operations, supply chain and other teams working to bring products to market, each department has a specific role. [Read more…]
Next week is RAMS – the Reliability and Maintainability Symposium. A multitrack 3.5-day conference with classes, tutorials, paper sessions, a small trade show, plus many of you – peers, colleagues, and friends in the reliability world.
The conference is hosted by 9 professional societies and organized by a group of about 50 or so volunteers from those societies (I was an active member of the RAMS management committee for many years). [Read more…]