Fundamentals of Design for Reliability

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

DFR has been a term in and out of fashion for some time—one of the many DFX type programs. DFR, unlike some of the other Design for X programs, has to exist within the overall culture of the organization to be successful. The premise that design occurs at the point of decision implies that each design may have the appropriate information to consider the decision’s impact on reliability performance properly. [Read more…]

10 Reasons to do FMEAs

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Everyone knows why we do reliability, and reliability things like FMEAs. Customer experience. Organization reputation. Reduced warranty claims 10 years from now. But these are boring reasons that really don’t motivate me to take FMEAs seriously now. Why should I invest so much time into an activity that benefits the ‘company’ or the ‘customer’ in the future but won’t make an immediate difference when my boss will give me a ‘gold star’ on my next performance appraisal? Right? Wrong! [Read more…]

 How to Plan an ALT

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

The more you understand the failure mechanisms, the easier it is to design an accelerated life test (ALT). Yet, we often do not have all the information we would like to draft an ALT. So, what do we do then?
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Fixing the Irrelevance of Reliability in Your Organization: Just ask ‘why’

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

There are so many books on leadership, management, more leadership, reliability, quality, customer first, even more leadership, et cetera. But there remains a common refrain I hear repeatedly from reliability engineers struggling to make a difference: ‘Reliability is just not relevant to my organization.’ There is a common thread to this common refrain – we only hear it from people who work in organizations that don’t have a clear understanding of ‘why’ they are doing what they do.

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Reliability Making Money — Case Study of just looking at a Weibull plot

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Reliability engineers LOVE Weibull plots. They often make sense out of a bunch of seemingly random points. Or at least we feel like they make sense. Anything that turns a bunch of random points into a straight line is automatically making sense … right? Wrong. It is up to us as reliability engineers to look at Weibull plots and work out what is going on. [Read more…]

Acceleration Factors with Examples

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

Carefully considering the acceleration factor (AF) is essential when conducting an accelerated life test. Like warp drives shortening the distance, accelerated life tests (ALT) attempt to shorten time. Think of the warp factor and acceleration factor as being similar, well, sort of. [Read more…]

Reliability Making Money

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

We all know that all you need to work out how many spare parts you need is to put some numbers into a computer, perhaps throw in a ‘confidence’ level as well, and use the number that the computer spits back out at you. Right? [Read more…]

Three Approaches to Accelerated Life Testing

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

We can make a guess, some assumptions, or conduct an experiment. In fact, we use engineering judgment, and prudent assumptions to create our experiments that lead to understanding time to failure information. Accelerated life testing, ALT, is one of the most complex and important types of experiments we conduct. It involves samples, failure mechanisms, stress, measurements, and statistics. [Read more…]

Looking Forward with Reliability Engineering

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

One of the things I like about reliability engineering is the field has a stable set of tools and approaches with an ever-changing set of challenges. The process of conducting an FMEA or Root Cause Analysis hasn’t changed much over time. Meanwhile, with the advent of new designs, materials, assembly techniques, and higher customer expectations, we continue to face interesting problems. [Read more…]

Reliability Analysis … now what? Part 4

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

This is the fourth in our webinar series, ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ We have examined how to turn data points (like the different failure points of devices under test) into something simple, useful, and sometimes beautiful! This is something that commercial software can’t do. [Read more…]

Reliability Engineering and Risk Analysis

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

Risk is uncertainty. Will this work? How will this item fail? Is it safe? Risk is not limited to product failure, including brand topics such as market acceptance, regulatory approval, supply chain stability, international conflicts, and more. Reliability engineering tends to focus on product failure to perform as expected, and we must fit into the large context of risks facing any product or system. [Read more…]

Reliability Analysis … now what? Part 3

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

This is the third in our webinar series ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ The first webinar showed what it means to turn reliability data into something a decision-maker can use. Not a chart. Not a graph. Not a ‘p’ value. Not anything else that you find in a textbook but isn’t useful. Last month’s webinar talked about how the best way to do this is to use computers … but in an easy way! And we talked about creating a ‘posse’ of possible ‘ways’ to explain the data we see. And this webinar is about how we use this thing called Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulation (MCMC) to create this ‘posse.’ And the ‘posse’ isn’t random … it is based on the ‘likelihood’ of each one being the correct one, which is how MCMC works. [Read more…]

Preventing Moisture and Corrosion Damage on Electronics in Harsh Conditions

podcast episode with speaker Dan Jenkins

The goal of this presentation is to educate the audience on options to prevent electronic equipment failure used in enclosed spaces from corrosion through preventative maintenance practices.    As most know, the metals used in today’s electronics are processed but want to turn back to their original state as the iron components will oxidize, and the corrosion process begins.  Adding humidity, vibration, temperature swings, and acid environments (such as being in a tire plant or downwind from a refinery) will accelerate the process.  It is this corrosion and subsequent weakening or disfiguring of the metal that causes malfunctions and failures [Read more…]

6 Essential Reliability Engineering Formulas

podcast episode with speaker Fred Schenkelberg

Dick Moss, retired HP Corporate Quality and Reliability Manager, once mentioned there are only five equations necessary to be a good reliability engineer. He quickly listed four equations and, with a smile, said the fifth one is the one you need to solve the current problem. [Read more…]

Reliability Analysis … now what? Part 2

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Last month’s webinar was ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ And we showed how to slightly ‘tweak’ all those textbook reliability analyses into USEFUL ACTIVITIES. What good is a 90 % confidence bound on reliability? What does this mean for profit? Or fleet size? Or mission success? We solved this problem by identifying the ‘likely’ ways we can explain our data. In fact – there is a whole bunch of statistics on creating the ‘likelihood’ of an explanation of what we see. We use this ‘likelihood’ in most statistical applications – including those USEFUL ACTIVITIES we discussed above. [Read more…]