Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of articles by:
In many program cases I see teams “testing to pass” when they should be “testing to improve”. Testing to pass is putting your best foot forward. There is a “mark” and you are going to hit it so you can advance to the next stage. Testing to Improve is looking for defects and response to inputs. The motivation for each is very different. The risk for leaders is overseeing teams who view their role objectives to be in line with “testing to pass.”
Iideytinnfg pantrtes in dtaa is why we pforrem stsiattaicl aalisnys. It is not an ecaxt sicncee but iarmitofonn can be exeaaltpotrd eevn if the dtaa is nsoiy or inmptcolee.
The Rseaon Wuleibl asaynlis is ieeeptmnlmd as a tool is to look for pntertas and tehn cetare a charisotairceatn of a cmomon boeihvar. Taht 
charcoeatistairn can tehn be uesd to unsretadnd uocnpimg silimar pntarets. The raoesn you hvae been albe to raed tihs alirtce is beusace yuor biran fgriued out taht eevn tuhogh teh wodrs are samerbcld the frsit and lsat leettr and the wrod lgnteh areare corcert.
Uisng tihs prttean and the sceentne coxnett and rninaemig ltrtees and cmipanrog taht asnaigt yuor vbualrcaoy you can qulikcy dremtinee the menanig of the sectnnee.
It’s spimly a mteatr of aniaslys, pteratn chractrsaoietian, and tehn precdoitin by aiplnypg taht chariocatestrian to a new dtaa set.
Wlel Dnoe !
-Aadm
The challenges of keeping reliability at the resource and schedule negotiating table mid-program can be greatly helped by a solid effort to connect it to the business case when the product program is created.
It’s the ambiguity of how reliability makes the company money that makes the case in live negotiation so difficult. Everyone knows that reliability affects sales, marketing, warranty expense, future development. But how do you compare that to the urgency of time to market or cost point? If you, as the reliability representative, can point to a specific quantitative connection made to the business case for the product you have one.
Apparently, my lovely wife is one of the best at finding stress testing limits of kitchen blenders, or we are unlucky at getting blenders that had some latent defect. She has discovered the destruct limit of 3 blenders within months of use. She does not do in the formal HALT methodology, as they break in what most would consider normal use conditions. It may have been a valid HALT evaluation if she had started with soft or easy to blend materials, starting with o ice or nuts and measured the time to reach its destruct limit. [Read more…]
So I wrote about how Mercedes has crummy reliability per Consumer Reports. I then threw a zinger at the end of the article saying I do have a Mercedes in the stable. So here is moment in time with her before we put her away for the winter last year. You will see the love/hate bloom and a benchmark with a 40 year old Japanese car. [Read more…]
Leading reliability efforts is a hard road. The resource required to improve reliability is significant. The resource to demonstrate reliability is gargantuan.
Mercedes used to be known for their outstanding reliability. They were the benchmark for 80 years ,no exageration. The new CLA250 model which is their base model has a reliability that is 140% less than the average rated car. What??? [Read more…]
Kishor forward the link to the recording to me and suggest it may of interest to the Accendo Reliability community. I agree. He does a great job discussing the topic and a clear and practical manner.
The video abstract is:
IEEE Life Fellow and Hudson Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University Prof. Kishor S. Trivedi visited Alibaba’s Hangzhou campus on Dec. 8th and talked about technical systems’ reliability and availability assurance methods based on probabilistic models. [Read more…]
There are a few ways to demonstrate statistical confidence in reliability of a design. Each has it reasons for selection. here are three of my favorites [Read more…]
OK, let’s admit it. We don’t always make the best decisions. And of course, those around us don’t either. And yet, to deliver a product with all the best features to a customer or market, at a competitive price and in time to make the sale, and that also will have good reliability and long life, requires everyone to make the right decisions in a timely fashion all along the way. It doesn’t take many adverse decisions to introduce field issues, increase warranty claims and lessen product life.
Reliability management and engineering is all about using the best tools to guide our decision-making. Becoming a good reliability engineer, or decision-maker of any kind, is about learning those tools – including when and where to use them.
I recently came across this announcement that HP is going to develop computer systems and peripheral devices that are optimized for environments where they are cleaned frequently, often medical environments. In the medical and scientific fields cleaning solutions are a significant stress for plastics, inks and touch control surfaces. It’s a smart strategy to evaluate where your products are used and optimize your test use cases. It most often will lead to more accurate test results and reliability projections. It may, as well, lead to a market opportunity that was previously unknown, and if you are the first among your competitors to acknowledge this need and create a specialized or derivative product you now grabbed a portion of the market that you may have not previously held.
A few others
-Adam
In most organizations being a reliability engineer is a lonely position. I like to think we’re so effective that one or just a small team is all any an organization needs.
As with any engineering position, we have specialized training and skills. We view the world and problems just a little differently than others. Then we use statistics, which tends to future isolate us from our peers.
For over 50 years there have been professional societies focused on supporting the professional education of reliability engineers. For nearly as long there have been trade journals and newsletters. Longer for technical journals and other scientific and engineering organizations and journals. [Read more…]
I was asked “Do you know about Singularity design?” I hadn’t heard the term in that context before.
It’s the concept of not approaching design from multiple disciplines. The design process is done with an approach and knowledge base of all needed disciplines at once and in conjunction. The electrical system isn’t designed by an electrical team and the mechanical by a mechanical team. The “Design Team” 
designs both simultaneously. Team members knowledge might be rooted in one discipline but there is clearly no boundary to their knowledge of other disciplines. This would be a mechanical engineer who has designed a PC board before.
Intuitively, the emphasis in reliability to achieve a reduction in warranty and in-service costs results in some minimal increase in development and manufacturing costs. However, use of the proper techniques during the proper life cycle phase will help to minimize total life cycle cost (LCC).
To minimize total LCC, your organization should do two things:
We make decisions every day. Our project teams and organizations have many individuals making decisions every day. Most of these decisions have little to do with product reliability, yet a surprising number of design, marketing, production, and customer care decisions that have a direct impact on product reliability performance.
As a reliability professional, do you work to make better decisions? Do you work to enable the individuals designing, producing, marketing, etc your organization’s products to make better decisions concerning reliability?
If not, why?
Let’s outline a few ways to estimate the value to you and your organization to improve decision making concerning reliability. [Read more…]
