Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
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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Let’s say that you have some ‘reliability guys’ do some reliability analysis on reliability data … and they give you some numbers. Or a plot. Or a curve. Perhaps you are the reliability guy … and you do the analysis – and then what? [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss how you can influence behavior. Good behavior. Like taking reliability seriously. It is not about what you say when you are forced to say it. It is about what you like saying and what you make your people do. So there are some things you can do to influence people in a good way. But it takes some effort on your behalf. Keen to learn more? Listen here!
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Chris and Fred discuss the organizations that culturally avoid engineering. Those organizations that for some reason, never ask for the data, the math, the tests, the thinking or anything else that might actually help you understand why your thing fails.
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Chris and Fred discuss when you should run qualification tests again. A qualification test can be anything – essentially all your product, system or service has to do is meet or exceed something to get a tick in the box. So if you make a minor change to your system – do you need to run all your qualification tests again? Can you get away with not doing any? Listen to this podcast to learn more!
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Chris and Fred discuss what it means to have confidence in something. Confidence can mean all things to all people. How confident are you as a person? How confident are you in someone else? What confidence do you have in a conclusion? Statisticians and reliability engineers need to talk to each other where the term confidence has a clearly defined and fixed meaning. But does it? How confident are you in the results of a test? How confident are you in a test that has 75 data points versus one that has 70? How confident will your boss be in you when you present the outcomes of these tests? Have these tests shaken YOUR confidence? Best you listen to this podcast.
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Some of you may have heard of ‘Bayesian analysis.’ You may think this is something fancy that only universities do. Or something we never do because it is all about ‘best guesses.’ Well … neither of these things are true.
Why would you be interested in Bayesian analysis? Simple. It allows you to use EVERY PIECE OF INFORMATION you have. This can be expert judgment. Or it can be test data on a similar ‘thing.’ Or it could be combining test data for one part of your ‘thing’ combined with test data for ‘all of your thing.’ [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss the typical decisions that are informed by reliability. It might be easier to list what decisions are not informed by reliability engineering. We came up with a list of 13 … and that is only because we ran out of time. What decisions you think are influenced by reliability engineering? Listen to this podcast to learn more.
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Chris and Fred discuss different strategies for reliability. We start with a couple of strategies that don’t work (big shout out to virtually every military customer … ever!) and then come up with some approaches that have been shown to work – at least in some circumstances. And that is the key – different scenarios demand different strategies. Sound interesting? Then this is the podcast for you.
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If reliability engineering costs you money, then you are doing it wrong. But chances are that someone you work for looks at reliability engineering as a black hole of costs. This needs to stop!
Reliability engineering is about creating value. Or money. Or more missions. Or safety. But it would help if you showed how this will happen. [Read more…]
Chris and Carl discuss reliability management.
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Have you ever wondered if your servicing intervals are ‘good’? Do you know what ‘good’ is? Are you servicing too much or too little? What happens if you service too much? Do you use some basic equations in textbooks and plug in numbers that seem too simple and basic, AND you don’t understand them (all at the same time)?
If you have asked yourselves any of these questions, then this is the webinar for you. A really simple, never done this before. Please join me in the discussion on what it actually means to optimize servicing intervals. [Read more…]
This is our fifth article about the 3 ways to do reliability allocation. We have been taken on a journey through the reliability design cycle, key steps for reliability allocation, allocation factors used to get these goals and key pitfalls. Now we finish off our conversation by looking at a few variations and applications. Allocating MTBF (… though we recommend against it), allocating availability, allocating maintainability (… another thing we recommend against) and allocating for different system reliability goals.
If you want to finish off your understanding of reliability allocation – read this!
Chris and Fred discuss what a leader, champion and manager are. Many textbooks, guidebooks and so-called ‘domain experts’ tell us what (for example) a ‘reliability leader’ is. In some cases the ‘reliability leader’ is someone who has little influence, and is more of an ad hoc ‘doer.’ Not a leader. Why is this? Listen to this podcast to hear more about this?
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