Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
There are two basic approaches when addressing product reliability: Reactive or Proactive. Neither is right or wrong.
The reactive approach has the limitation of responding to failures that occur during prototyping, production and customer use.
The proactive approach focuses on preventing product design, assembly, and use issues before they have the opportunity to create a product failure.
Do you let events happen to you, or do events follow your designs and expectations? Are you a spectator or actor? Do you wonder about your product’s future or do you control your product’s future? Are you reactive or proactive?
Every reliability and maintenance program is a system. Every program has inputs, such as product testing results and field returns. Every reliability program has outputs, such as product design and production. In the most basic terms, a reliability program includes product specifications for functionality including expected durability. The program includes some form of design, verification, production and field performance. Given this basic lifecycle description, it is possible for two types of approaches to executing the product lifecycle. [Read more…]