Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
We are rather good at being surprised when setting expectations for the future. This is the essence of risk. The difference between what we expect to occur or would like to occur, and what does occur.
The definition of risk in ISO 9000:2015 and ISO 31000 include the phrase “ effect of uncertainty”. Let’s remove some of the uncertainty around the term uncertainty in the context of risk and risk management. [Read more…]
Fred and Mohammad sat down at RAMS 2017 to talk about the conference and his work in the field of reliability.
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In a customer’s mind, the product works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t work as expected it has failed. This may or may not be a reliability problem.
A customer or someone using your product brings a set of expectations to the experience. The range of expectations may range from very little to very high functioning, value production, and durability.
Failures are defined by customers.
In part, this is the functional capability, the operating within specifications, and the durability. The customer’s definition of reliability may or may not follow the design specifications.
It is the comparison of what should happen to what does happen. [Read more…]
Did you know that hot air doesn’t rise when there is no or very little gravity?
The electronics used to steer an oil exploration drill head 5 miles deep in the earth experiences 200°C sulfuric acid immersion along with continuous 50,000G shocks.
I used to think the environment under the hood a car was difficult. [Read more…]
Every failure has valuable information you and your team require to improve reliability. During the development process, each failure may represent a future recall. Celebrate every failure. Let your FRACAS prioritize which failures to resolve.
[Read more…]
When something doesn’t work as expected, it is a failure. A common response to a failure by an organization is to restore the system or remedy the situation.
Each failure is unique to the product, industry, customer situation, expectations, etc. Selecting the appropriate response or corrective action when confronted with a failure may or may not be obvious.
Selecting the right corrective action depends on the business and legal factors, along with customer expectations.
For a given failure, thinking through the range of possible responses and selecting the right one takes care to meet the various stakeholder’s requirements or expectations. [Read more…]
How well can you describe the use conditions your product will experience?
How well do you need to know the use conditions?
For some situations, the environment for your product is assessable, others are not. For some situations, we guess the range of expected stresses, others we measure.
The design process and the myriad decisions that impact product reliability rely on characterized environmental stresses.
A great place to consolidate how and where customers will use your product (including the relevant stress factors) is in an environmental manual. [Read more…]
From the simplest to the most complex system, building and using a reliability model permits the entire team to make better decisions.
Understanding and monitoring system reliability involves knowing both:
We use system reliability models to identify weak links, and focus resources, to meet our desired reliability goals.
Being able to build the right model to meet your team’s needs best is one of your roles as a reliability professional. [Read more…]
The term variance is a statistical concept related to the spread or dispersion of a set of data. Second to the mean, it a common value we may calculate.
We find standard deviation easier to understand and use (it uses the same units as the data) whereas variance uses the units squared.
We use variance in quite a few different ways. Let’s review just a few. [Read more…]
Finding solutions is reliability engineering too.
Have you noticed that finding solutions often requires just the right question, the proper framing of the issue, the query that reveals the problem and solution?
One of the best ways to lead a team and provide a focus on reliability performance is to ask the right questions.
Understanding objectives, risks, and failures is what we primarily do as reliability professionals. We work with teams to achieve or improve reliability performance.
We ask questions. [Read more…]
The world of risk management has a unique set of risk terminology.
Your ability to incorporate reliability concerns into risk discussions hinges on understanding the terms in use.
Let’s explore a few terms and how they relate to reliability engineering. [Read more…]
Reliability goals or objectives are just a starting point.
You goals represent your target at one point in time.
At best they represent what your customers expect for reliability performance at one point in time.
When goals are set well, they anticipate what your customer expects when they receive your product. In a perfect world, you customer will find the reliability performance just a bit better than expected.
It’s not a perfect world. [Read more…]
Reliability testing is expensive, time-consuming, and fraught with errors. Is it worth the effort? Is it necessary? Let’s explore relegating testing to only a ‘when necessary’ status. Let’s explore what you and your team can do instead.
[Read more…]
Creating a reliable product that meets customer expectations is risky.
What is risk and how does one go about managing risk? The recent set of ISO standard updates elevates risk management.
A starting place is a definition. [Read more…]
This type of reliability may have different names. A quick search of a few references in my library and I didn’t find ongoing reliability testing, ORT, in any of them.
It does exist and you may have heard of it before or even use some form of ORT. Or not.
Ongoing reliability testing or ORT is the continued evaluation of your product typically using samples drawn from production. The testing evaluates the reliability performance of recent production units.
The focus is on finding anomalies or changes that may occur in the design, supply chain, or production process that significantly changes field reliability performance. [Read more…]