“Use Case 7” is a concept I am rolling out.  Use Case 7 is the way a customer may use your product in a manner that is way beyond anything you expect.

Examples:

1. Me using a power drill as a hammer. “I’m not walking all the way back in the house to get a hammer just to put a nail in!”
2. My Dad when he used to load 300lbs of firewood into the back of his Nissan Sentra. Then make us kids lay on top of it since the seats had to be folded down.  But I think that last part is more of a child services situation.
3. That wire shirt coat hanger with the leather motorcycle jacket on it, and three pairs of wet ski glove clipped to it…and you hold onto it when you bend down to pick up your shoes.
4. You when you were sixteen and had your parents car in a full drift in the mall parking lot on Saturday night (I’m projecting here), or when you owned that same car and didn’t change the oil…ever (sorry Dad)

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Happy New Year! And thank you for letting us break your stuff to improve your design in 2018. This is a story of when I was NOT invited to break things but did anyway.

When something is working it is easy to just keep going forward.  But how do you know things will keep chugging along? Is it worth stopping and asking “Why is this going well?”

I like lock picking “Lock Sport.”  Of course I do.  It’s a mechanical puzzle.  It can also make you look like James Bond when someone forget’s their keys.  I continue to challenge myself by getting progressively harder and harder locks.  Throughout the years lock designs have come up with some great features to resist being picked.  But there is still not one out there that is “pick proof”, so there is always a next level.  I would say I am a mid-intermediate in the world of Lock Sport.  So any lock that actually has good picking defenses can give me a good struggle.

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As a reliability guy I love seeing how stuff works.  Was recently given an opportunity to mess around and compare a new product to it’s siblings in a field I love, welding. I recently provided some input on an article release by Superiorglove about types of insulation and heat conduction. Superiorglove is a glove manufacturer that makes about every type of glove you could imagine, many are really impressive industrial applications gloves. I like how much they get into the science of it. In our discussions I used an example of how my TIG welding gloves protect against conductive and radiative types of heat transfer.  They informed me that they had a TIG welding glove line and would love if I would review four of their models.   I happily accepted because I love to weld, check out how things work and …free gloves.

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I had the unbelievable pleasure of piloting a retired 1953 T-34 Air Force plane.  The plane is owned by a friend and it has recently undergone a full restoration.  A few year ago this model was grounded by the FAA due to an unusual issue.  After the investigation the fleet was cleared to fly and the root cause was ruled as “mis-use.”  Something many of use may not consider enough when creating our own products.

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I just returned from a great conference in Stuttgart called “Reliability Days.”  I presented on some new concepts and techniques with regard to assessing and improving reliability culture in the product development process. Enjoy the presentation.

-Adam

I have heard that “Reliability and Quality are kissing cousins” and also that “Reliability is Quality over time.”  Neither of these definitions ring true to me.  To be honest I’m a smidge offended because both of these terms diminish the value of the objective of reliability.  I would state that reliability is “The design of a device or system so that it works as intended consistently over it’s defined use-life.”  To me the key differentiator from my definition and the previous two descriptions of reliability is the word “design.”

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