Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Continuing the series where we examine various roles within an organization and the ways in which each role interacts and affects product reliability, this post will start off with procurement engineers and managers. Since each role hereafter is a bit less involved, multiple roles will be grouped together. After procurement, we’ll take a look at warranty managers. [Read more…]
The target, objective, mission or goal is the statement that provides a design team with focus and direction. A well-stated goal will establish the business connection to the technical decisions, related to product durability expectations. A well-stated goal provides clarity across the organization and permits a common language for discussing design, supply chain, and manufacturing decisions.
Let’s explore the definition of a ‘well-stated reliability goal.’ First, is it not simple MTBF, “as good as or better than…” or ‘a 5-year product’. These are common ‘goals’ found across many industries, yet none permit a clear technical understanding of the durability expectations for the product.
The common definition for reliability is [Read more…]
The reliability goal is a key element across the entire product lifecycle. From product definition to determining warranty to judging performance, knowing the goal in clear terms sets the stage for a successful product.
Reliability in engineering terms is the probability of satisfactory product performance within a defined environment over a stated duration. [Read more…]
Let’s say we have a product that most often fails for one major component. Let’s say a fan (it could be anything, and while I don’t have anything against fans, it’s easy to picture).
Ok, this fan has a data sheet with the classic reliability claim of 50,000 hours MTBF. For those that know about my disdain for MTBF (www.nomtbf.com) rest assured I’m not going to get into it here. The basic approach for estimating the number of failure during any [Read more…]