Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
We all know that all you need to work out how many spare parts you need is to put some numbers into a computer, perhaps throw in a ‘confidence’ level as well, and use the number that the computer spits back out at you. Right? [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss the roles assumption play in reliability. Assumptions can be very useful … or very dangerous. Why? Because assumptions are information. If they are based on nothing, then assumptions become misinformation. Which means you make the wrong decision. Listen to this podcast to learn more!
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Chris and Fred discuss how we confirm the reliability of something we are making. Or maintaining. Or managing. This is in response to someone raising a question regarding reliability allocation – based on an Accendo webinar. And the question was all about working out how to test that we are on track to meet goals allocated to subsystems and components. So what do we do? Well listen to this podcast!
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Chris and Fred discuss ‘why’ leadership. Not why leadership is important (we know it is). But the sort of leadership that focuses on the ‘why’ of an organization or group of people. ‘Why’ people who work at these organizations get out of bed in the morning. ‘Why’ customers purchase products or services from an organization. And if we get the ‘why’ right … everything becomes a lot easier. Especially reliability.
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Chris and Fred discuss ‘Problem #5.’ What is problem #5? Well … technically it isn’t a problem at all. Which is what we want to be doing as reliability engineers. Preventing problems from occurring. Most people look at reliability engineers as (perhaps at best) addressing field failures or failures in the hands of the customers. But reliability engineering is much more valuable than that. Reliability engineering prevents you from not meeting budget or not achieving scheduled milestones. In fact … field failures (which are what we call ‘Problem #1’) are incidental to good reliability engineering. Want to learn more?
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This is the fourth in our webinar series, ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ We have examined how to turn data points (like the different failure points of devices under test) into something simple, useful, and sometimes beautiful! This is something that commercial software can’t do. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss what performance actually means. When it comes to reliability engineering … is this simply having fewer failures? NO! There is plenty more to reliability engineering than simply taking a ‘thing’ and simply making it work for longer. How can reliability engineering make more appealing, more functional, and less expensive products? Listen to this podcast for more!
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Chris and Fred discuss how we use standards for reliability engineering, safety, and other similar fields. Standards have a place in everything we do. But issues come when we stop thinking about the thing we are creating and rely on the standards to guide really important decisions. Why is this silly? Listen to the podcast!
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This is the third in our webinar series ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ The first webinar showed what it means to turn reliability data into something a decision-maker can use. Not a chart. Not a graph. Not a ‘p’ value. Not anything else that you find in a textbook but isn’t useful. Last month’s webinar talked about how the best way to do this is to use computers … but in an easy way! And we talked about creating a ‘posse’ of possible ‘ways’ to explain the data we see. And this webinar is about how we use this thing called Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulation (MCMC) to create this ‘posse.’ And the ‘posse’ isn’t random … it is based on the ‘likelihood’ of each one being the correct one, which is how MCMC works. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss what a ‘body of knowledge’ or ‘BOK’ should do? And by this we mean a document or book that outlines the key ideas or things you should know for doing ‘something’ … like reliability. There are many textbooks which are (let’s face it) not helpful because they are ‘too technical’ – and not useful for the majority of reliability decisions. But we can go too far the other way as well and make things too simple – so we just plug and play tools. Without knowing what each tool does. Sound familiar? Listen to this podcast!
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Chris and Fred discuss the urge for (us) reliability engineers to rush to use a tool – and not understand what that tool does, how it works, or even if it answers the question you are trying to answer. Why is this? We sometimes (always) like solving problems. But in our rush to solve a problem … do we solve the right problem? Do we create more problems? What’s a ‘problem?’ Sound familiar or scary? Listen to this podcast.
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Last month’s webinar was ‘Reliability Analysis … now what?’ And we showed how to slightly ‘tweak’ all those textbook reliability analyses into USEFUL ACTIVITIES. What good is a 90 % confidence bound on reliability? What does this mean for profit? Or fleet size? Or mission success? We solved this problem by identifying the ‘likely’ ways we can explain our data. In fact – there is a whole bunch of statistics on creating the ‘likelihood’ of an explanation of what we see. We use this ‘likelihood’ in most statistical applications – including those USEFUL ACTIVITIES we discussed above. [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss the age-old problem of ‘influence’ or lack thereof when you are a small buyer. Influence to get reliable components. Influence to have that supplier remedy your issues. Because you feel too small and insignificant. Sound familiar? Then listen to this podcast.
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Chris and Fred discuss the idea of timing how long you spend talking about ‘reliability engineering.’ And by this, we mean conversation where you (1) proactively talking about preventing failures before they occur, and (2) in a way where something gets done about it (improving something)? Let’s say someone timed how much time your organization spent on this sort of conversation – would you be proud of the number you get?
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Chris and Fred talk about accelerated life testing or ALT. Well before we start, we need to work out what the decision we are informing is. Want to learn more? Listen to this podcast.
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