Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
HALT promises to find the weaknesses in your design early in the design process. Understanding the basic concepts underlying HALT enables you to do so effectively. Let’s discuss this essential discovery tool and how it fits into your program.
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Highly Accelerated Life Testing, HALT, is a method to discover the weaknesses in a design. Using a step stress approach of single and combined stresses, you can quickly expose the salient weaknesses in your design and/or assembly process.
The value of HALT is it’s quick and often finds problems not previously known. You will destroy one or more prototypes, yet the value of knowing specifically what needs improvement more than justifies the sacrifice of a few photos.
Conducting HALT may be part of your reliability plan. Keeping a few steps in mind will help make sure your HALT does provide value back to your development efforts. [Read more…]
Remember that first time you were asked to step into a leadership or management role, or to manage a client relationship? The experience was probably exciting and unsettling at the same time. Something different was asked of you.
While many of us have succeeded as individual contributors or team members, succeeding as a leader or manager requires a new set of skills we have often not been given the opportunity to acquire. This applies whether we carry an official leadership responsibility or not. In a future article it would be interesting to explore the distinction between “leader” and “manager”. [Read more…]
Dr. Taguchi was an engineer, not a statistician. He considered the ability of design of experiments (DOE) to identify and reduce sources of variability, yet needed a system that did not require a statistician to implement.
Dr. Taguchi proposed a few considerations for those applying the Taguchi design of experiments approach. [Read more…]
Analyzing and visualizing data that is related to equipment wear-out (fatigue stage) over a specific time span is a challenge. Analyzing systems, equipment and components exposed to spectrum loading as opposed to uniform cyclical loading that span years or decades or centuries requires a special approach. Think of roads, bridges and other assets with long life spans that are susceptible to wear out mechanisms caused by external and internal loads, varying load durations, temperature swings and corrosion. [Read more…]
Taguchi may be best known for the variation of design of experiments that bear his name. Yet the impact of his work is felt across the product life cycle and all of the quality field.
Building on Deming’s observations that 85% of poor quality is due to faulty processes and only 15% due to the worker, Taguchi focused on creating robust processes.
A robust system is one that tolerates the daily and seasonal variations of the environment, machine wear, and equipment part-to-part variation, etc. A robust system operating in the range of real world conditions. [Read more…]
Leadership is not a position or title within an organization. It is an attitude.
You’ve seen the internet meme’s about the difference between leadership and management. There is a difference and while not everyone is going to be in top management, everyone can (and should) be a leader.
As a reliability professional, you are conveniently looked to for leadership. You are expected to use your knowledge and skill to solve problems. To help teams solve problems. To improve the reliability performance of your system and across your industry. [Read more…]
Recently Peter Stuttard asked if I knew of a reference for the perfect strength and perfect stress concepts. I didn’t and asked for a bit of explanation of the phrases.
Here is his reply (via Linkedin, btw a great tool to get and stay in touch) posted with permission with minor formatting edits.
To learn more about Peter check out his Linkedin profile.
Fred
Thanks for responding so quickly, the concepts of Perfect Strength and Perfect Stress are related to your discussion re Parts Count and Parts Stress predictions and reading this on your web site prompted me to ask you about them. [Read more…]
Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) starts with brainstorming and ends with prioritized actions. A great tool to get your team thinking about system failures. Let’s explore the fundamental steps and beset practices to get value from your analysis.
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Have you ever worked on a project with no deadlines, unlimited resources, and boundless scope? Probably not.
You may have worked under the guidelines of a quality triangle, also known as a project management triangle, iron triangle, or project triangle.
Why is that? Why the limits to our ability to create a product or improve a system?
First, the world we work and live within has limits. We have only so much time for work, only the available resources, and limited knowledge. We do our best with what we have to work with at the time.
Second, as I once was told while working on an accelerated test design, ‘if there isn’t a deadline, you’ll happily tinker with the plan and get the testing done.’ My boss was right of course.
The set of constraints shape our projects and products. By understanding the set of constraints, specifically how they frame decisions, then we can complete complex projects. [Read more…]
Fred and Thomas sat down at RAMS 2017 to talk about his work as a reliability engineer (actually a quality engineer) and a range of reliablity topics.
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In a recent Seth Godin blog, Counting beans he talks about the eventual costs of little compromises. The immediate benefit may be celebration worthy, yet
But overlooked are the unknown costs over time, the erosion in brand, the loss in quality, the subtraction from something that took years to add up.
This certainly applies to reliability as well. Deferring maintenance just one more month, addressing one more software bug can be done after shipping, and similar small shifts erode reliability of your system. [Read more…]
Customers of your product would like the particular one they have to work. To work over time.
If a product meets the customer’s expectation by working as long or longer than they expected it to do so, then they may consider your product reliable.
We use reliability goals to discuss the customer’s reliability expectations. It is the establishment of requirements that converts the customer expectations to development and production obligations. [Read more…]
For this milestone episode (200th show) Fred asked the co-host consultants how they got started in consulting.
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Fred and Phil sat down to talk about MTBF, RAMS, and the work he does in the reliability world.
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