Asking the right question is important.

During a review meeting (informal or formal) asking a few reliability questions may reveal weaknesses, strengths, or uncertainty. The design team has many priorities and reliability is often difficult to estimate, yet knowing what is and isn’t known provides a clear picture of risks for decision makers.

If you are a decision maker and need to ascertain the reliability risks of the current design, then asking a couple of questions may provide just the insights you need. It also conveys that reliability is on your mind and that you want to have answers that are meaningful and well thought out.

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Selecting a supplier for components or subsystems involves many aspects including the desired reliability performance.

Once selected the ability of the supplier to provide items that meet or exceed the reliability requirements relies on their understanding of the requirements and operational conditions related to the specific item within the system. It also relies on the supplier’s knowledge of their own design and manufacturing processes as it related to the reliability performance. [Read more…]

The reliable performance of a system is important. It is important to the customer, to our business and to us.

Very few argue that we should ignore the reliability characteristics of a product. We also deem cost, time to market or feature set as important also. The trouble is we can measure the latter directly every day, where the reliability performance is often difficult to measure.

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Coupled with probability is the duration over which the probability applies.

For example, if we desire 99 of 100 to survive, we must state over which period of time this applies. It is proper to state the couplet of 99% reliable over 1 year.

It is not sufficient to define reliability as ‘5-year product’ as it does not contain the information related to how many are expected to survive the 5 years. Likewise, it is not sufficient to say a product has 5 – 9’s reliability (meaning the probability of failure is less than 0.00001) as it does not contain the duration.

If the product has high reliability for only a few seconds, that does not help us make judgments about the first year of life. [Read more…]

Once asked a customer what they wanted concerning product reliability.

She fully understood that some units will fail, that it’s matter of chance. She seemed understanding of the difficulty creating every product such that none would fail.

Then she confided that all that is fine, as long as the product she buys does not fail. [Read more…]