Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Chris and Fred discuss questions that are easy to ask … but hard to answer. And these questions are often hard to answer because the person asking the question hasn’t thought about the REAL question they are trying to answer. So how many samples do I need for everything to be OK???
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Chris and Fred discuss how statistics, mechanisms, and other technical words that come from ‘reliability engineering’ in contrast to softer terms like ‘facilitation.’ This comes from discussions Chris has had during his Statistical Process Control (SPC) course that he has run previously. So what is the big deal about these words? Well … you can know everything there is to know about statistics and failure mechanisms – but if you can’t make things better then it is all for nothing!
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Chris and Fred discuss a ‘common slope assumption’ … which is something that only those of you with reliability engineering experience will have heard about. This is all about what we called ‘accelerated life testing’ where we increase stresses to accelerate failure. And software that is used to model accelerated life testing. Keen to learn more? Listen to this podcast!
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Chris and Fred discuss statistics! Yay! And how we can be better at using them in a practical way. And that starts with wanting to learn about statistics. But how do we make that happen?
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Chris and Fred discuss what you need to look for when choosing suppliers. The keyword here is the (human) suppliers … not the inanimate supplies!
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Chris and Fred discuss how in spite of all the wonderful new techniques and technologies that are becoming available … we still need to focus almost all our effort on the basics.
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Chris and Fred discuss what it means to be ‘confident.’ Is it the way you carry yourself? Is it being able to rely or trust on something? Or is it the probability that some variable quantity will be within two limits? More importantly … what does this mean in the domain of reliability and quality?
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What is ‘supportability?’ Easy! It’s the ability of your product, system or service to be supported. But how do we get this so wrong so often? Well, the first way is by thinking that supportability is actually some activity where you work out how many spares you need to have on your shelf to last a year (for example). But what if your product, system, or service fails so often and is so difficult to repair that it needs LOTS of spare parts? Working this out doesn’t make it more supportable. Another way people get supportability wrong is by thinking about it AFTER you have designed something. How is this wrong? Well … supportability needs to be DESIGNED INTO your product, system, or service. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss what ‘risk’ is. Or what most people think ‘risk’ is. Or what the experts think ‘risk’ is. Or what ‘risk’ feels like. Do you know what ‘risk’ is?
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Chris and Fred discuss a real-world problem … how do we use reliability engineering tools to work out how select a hospital power supply system.
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Once we have made something really reliable (or really available) … then comes the part where we have to work out how many of them we need (if they make up a fleet) or how many spare parts we need to keep them running. That is where discrete distributions are really helpful. They assign probabilities to ‘discrete’ random variables. These are random variables that can only have certain specified values. Like whole numbers. For example … the number of failures you expect to see in a mission. Or the number of available systems out of a given fleet size. If this sounds like something that could help you out … see you for this webinar!
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Chris and Fred discuss … MTBFs! Fred’s favorite! We (should) know that Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) is not reliability. So what do we do if we somehow need to get reliability from nothing but the MTBF.
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Chris and Fred discuss what the purpose of a ‘Body of Knowledge’ or BOK is? … or what is a BOK? … especially when it comes to reliability?
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Chris and Fred discussing another question from a listener based on ‘as low as reasonably practicable’ or ALARP. This is used a lot in risk management and analysis … but what is it?
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Chris and Fred discussing service reliability based on a listener question where we don’t just look at reliability as it applies to an item, product or device. Instead … we look at ‘reliability of a service’ … or system, … or process. How can this help a farmer who is trying to work out how to best supply water to his cattle?
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