Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
If you have ever been involved in manufacturing or quality-related conversations, you may have heard of ‘Statistical Process Control’ or SPC. And if you Google SPC you will find a bunch of ‘textbooky’ definitions which are likely going to make you run away and never think of it again.
But you shouldn’t. [Read more…]
I like to say Reliability is all of quality over time. Quality professional tend to say reliability is an element of quality. David A. Garvin of the Harvard Business School suggests there are eight dimensions to quality, including reliability.
Either way one relates quality and reliability we need to remember that quality or reliability is not a department, team, the engineering down the hall. Quality and reliability is part of the culture of the organization. It is how we make decisions the impact how the product or service performs for customers. [Read more…]
The Quality Triangle provides a method to establish priorities for a project. It strives to balance time, cost, and quality (or scope instead of quality). It does not include reliability.
Now I am a bit bias as a reliability engineer and believe a projects set of priorities should explicitly include reliability performance. Of course, there are many potential priorities, yet reliability certainly can make or break a product, it’s market acceptance, and an organization’s profitability.
So, given a quality triangle based set of priorities, how does reliability fit in? [Read more…]
Depending upon the type of engineer you ask the word test evokes a different notion of goals and expectations.
Engineers who work on the design of semiconductors test that their designs meet the specifications.
This can be done pre-silicon and naturally verified in-depth on silicon.
Engineers concerned with manufacturing of a product test to find defects and to verify performance.
Similar approaches can be taken by both engineers though there exist differences in the amount of time. To be cost effective, a manufacturing test must be completed in as short a time as possible. Let’s continue to compare and contrast design validation with manufacturing test. [Read more…]
Dr. Taguchi was an engineer, not a statistician. He considered the ability of design of experiments (DOE) to identify and reduce sources of variability, yet needed a system that did not require a statistician to implement.
Dr. Taguchi proposed a few considerations for those applying the Taguchi design of experiments approach. [Read more…]
Taguchi may be best known for the variation of design of experiments that bear his name. Yet the impact of his work is felt across the product life cycle and all of the quality field.
Building on Deming’s observations that 85% of poor quality is due to faulty processes and only 15% due to the worker, Taguchi focused on creating robust processes.
A robust system is one that tolerates the daily and seasonal variations of the environment, machine wear, and equipment part-to-part variation, etc. A robust system operating in the range of real world conditions. [Read more…]
Have you ever worked on a project with no deadlines, unlimited resources, and boundless scope? Probably not.
You may have worked under the guidelines of a quality triangle, also known as a project management triangle, iron triangle, or project triangle.
Why is that? Why the limits to our ability to create a product or improve a system?
First, the world we work and live within has limits. We have only so much time for work, only the available resources, and limited knowledge. We do our best with what we have to work with at the time.
Second, as I once was told while working on an accelerated test design, ‘if there isn’t a deadline, you’ll happily tinker with the plan and get the testing done.’ My boss was right of course.
The set of constraints shape our projects and products. By understanding the set of constraints, specifically how they frame decisions, then we can complete complex projects. [Read more…]
Some quality paradigms are expensive.
Quality is a mindset! When a wise man is given the chance to buy quality items he does so because quality pays for itself.
A quality item lasts longer, runs better and looks good when others fade. To change the way you think about quality takes a lot of experience with using poorer options. When you are sitting down with your head in your hands wondering what can be done to get costs down, to get production up and how you are going to hit the key performance indicators, remember the importance of quality equipment, quality systems, quality training and your quality mindset!
Keywords: quality control [Read more…]