Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of articles by:
Ask people involved with the design and manufacture of a product the following question: “What is Quality?” Many if not most of the responses will be some form of the following: “Quality is ensuring that our products meet the customer (or engineering) specifications. Unfortunately, this leads to a “conformance to specifications” or a “Product Control” approach to quality. [Read more…]
Would you like the reliability of all your products and their service parts, without assumptions, in real environments, and with all premature failures, complaints, repairs, warranty expirations, preventive maintenance, changes, warranty extensions, etc.? Field reliability tells what really happens! [Read more…]
Abraham Lincoln taught the value of adequate preparation when he said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” By nature and training, quality inspectors are focused on verifying the correctness of a product. A traditional inspector at the Lincoln Timber Company might have dutifully marked in her audit log the date and time, the type and size of tree, followed by the comment, “Cut down.”
But Honest Abe would have advised her to take a closer look at the tools and process used to complete the job. [Read more…]
Meaning of Identifiers
K&R
HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Test). There is an opinion that “its name doesn’t do it justice”.
In the first Part “Is the HALT a Life Test or not?” we added the test time to the HALT stress set. We see there is the Life in HALT.
In Part 2 we added knowledge of the lifetime distribution type and a shape parameter (variation). We were able to evaluate the reliability during the warranty time with a given CL by “pulling the lifetime distribution by the tail”. We see HALT may be a quantitative Test. [Read more…]
“Number rules the universe.” – Pythagoras
Risk Priority Number (RPN) . . . by definition, a single number that represents relative risk for prioritizing issues in an FMEA. Sounds simple. But, how well does it work in practice? And, is there a better way?
This article highlights shortcomings and concerns when using RPN in FMEA, and discusses an alternative. It is a companion article to “Prioritizing risk for corrective actions in an FMEA.”
In the first part “Is the HALT a Life Test or not?” we added the test time to the HALT stress set. What does this give us for lifetime evaluation when testing one or two samples? The correct answer is nothing. But if we add knowledge of the lifetime distribution type and a shape parameter (variation), then we can work with its tails [Read more…]
Astro Teller
It is generally known that HALT testing means destroying a product with stepped stresses. Most experts agree that HALT doesn’t’ provide much information about life and the acronym of HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Test) is wrong. [Read more…]
Manufacturing companies are struggling with the persistent and growing problem of finding employees with the skills needed to sustain and grow their businesses. This problem is commonly called the “skills gap.” Experts estimate that this skills gap may leave 2.4 million manufacturing positions unfilled through 2028, with a potential economic impact of $2.5 trillion (Deloitte 2018).
One of the key drivers of this gap is the rapid influx of technology into every aspect of manufacturing. New technology of course, requires new skills. In a 2019 article published by McKinsey, analysts identified six emerging trends in facilities management, each requiring new skills and each offering opportunities for career growth. (Adhikari, 2019) [Read more…]
One of the most common questions I get from students in my Process Capability Class is, how can I use the capability index from my process to approximate a defect level for my process? [Read more…]
“Time is money” – Benjamin Franklin
One of the most common complaints about FMEAs is that they can take a long time to do. This article presents solutions to this challenge.
One of the common misunderstandings about business profit among non-finance professionals is that it there is more than one way to define it.
At its core, profit is calculated as Revenue minus Costs. If you bought a bicycle at a yard sale for $50, then sold it a week later on Craigslist for $80, your profit is $30. In a simple transaction, profit is easily understood. But within an organization, different types of profits have to be defined to better understand the flow of money through it. [Read more…]
Several times during my career, as I’ve listened across the interview table to an eager and aspiring job candidate, I’ve realized this person has very few skills that will readily transfer into the position I’m offering. They spent years working at their previous company. But how much work will immediately apply to our open position. And conversely, how much work will be required to get them up to speed? And in that moment, I mentally moved them to the bottom of my “viable candidates” list. Why? Because that candidate has too few transferrable skills. [Read more…]
One of the most important concepts in designing for reliability is robust design. This article is a high-level overview of robust design and its relationship to FMEA.
“For the robust, an error is information.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Business today is more competitive than ever. As a result, successful business leaders often need to make quick decisions with less than complete data. The wrong decision could result in significant losses, layoffs, or worse. This is where quality professionals and other data-savvy specialists can offer some assistance: by making the best analysis possible given the available data. [Read more…]
Return on Investment Analysis (ROIA), sometimes referred to as Capital Equipment Justification, is the process of building and analyzing a financial model for the purpose of determining the net financial contribution of obtaining a major investment like a factory building or piece of production equipment.
ROIA is the link that connect the brilliant ideas of makers–the engineers, designers and builders—to the goals of the managers who hold organization’s purse strings. When thoroughly conducted, ROIA aligns the best estimates of the revenues and expenses related to a potential purchase with the years in which they will occur.
