Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
System engineering is a superset of the other engineering fields (mechanical, civil, electrical, software, etc.) as the system engineers work to bring all the various elements of a system together into a final and cohesive whole. [Read more…]
None, actually.
Or, one really good reliability engineering professional.
Or, an entire staff of highly talented reliability engineers.
The number of reliability engineers on staff really doesn’t matter. The outcome of your product and system reliability is not contingent on headcount or office space or list of degrees. [Read more…]
Education options have exploded.
For the past 75 years, we read books, returned to campus, attended workshops, traveled to conferences, and participated in evening meetings. Today, we have more options from more sources for our professional development.
This is the first annual survey to find what you recommend for those preparing for the ASQ CRE exam.
See the full list of reliability references for the CRE exam, for reliability and maintenance engineers at Accendo Reliability. [Read more…]
One way to capture and disseminate reliability engineering related information and advice is through internal documents. This of course only works if they are both useful and used.
Focus on gathering and providing essential and meaningful information that will improve the reliability of your product. Another element that makes these design guidelines valuable is if they save time. Engineers love to save time. [Read more…]
The software element of products continues to grow.
Likewise, the number of field failures due to software issues continues to grow. Writing code is relatively straight forward, and some may even say it’s fun.
The process of debugging, or finding and fixing software defects, is not fun. [Read more…]
Just asking a customer how reliable they want your product often provokes an honest answer. The customer, and you most likely, do not want any failures.
Failures are troublesome or in some cases dangerous.
You and your customers realize that not every unit produced will operate over a long and useful life. There is some chance that something will fail. The definition of ‘some’ is often vague. [Read more…]
The reliability engineer may have many roles within an organization.
You may be specialized and focused only on the analysis of field data. Or you may be a member of the organization’s strategic leadership team.
You might support one or more product development teams, or work with a team of reliability professionals supporting just one subsystem. [Read more…]
Monte Carlo relies on data that describes the variation of elements within the system. It also connects the elements such that they result is an estimate of performance.
For reliability modeling, this is easiest to imagine for a series system.
For a system with two elements in series, a very simple reliability block diagram multiples the expected reliability for each block to determine the system reliability value. Yet, it is possible to have both elements at the low end of the range of possible reliability values, or the high end or a mix.
That is the value of the Monte Carlo approach. [Read more…]
Ethics relate to the moral correctness of a person’s behavior given the groups moral principles.
Society, in general, has a set of standard expectations to guide our behavior. This includes fundamentals such as not harming others or behaving in a deceitful manner.
Religious, professional and informal ‘codes’ document the set or principles which guide our behavior in line with moral correctness. [Read more…]
Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is a technique to explore the many potential or actual causes of product or system failure.
Best applied when there are many possible ways something may fail. For example, when my car doesn’t start, it could be a dead battery, faulty started, loose wire, no fuel, and on and on. [Read more…]
You have signed up to sit for the CRE exam.
You have the education and experience. Then, you look at the CRE body of knowledge—the breadth of statistics, the range of tools, the plethora of concepts.
You need to review the material. Where do you start?
Each organization creates their own version of a product life cycle.
Often there are phase gate reviews that signal a transition from one phase to the next. In general, each set of phases follows a common progression from idea to retirement.
There are many references that include a description of the life cycle phases, so let’s explore two of them. [Read more…]
Customers experience product failures.
Understanding these failures that occur in the hands of customers is an essential undertaking. We need this information to identify increasing failure rates, component batch or assembly errors, or design mistakes. [Read more…]
The planning of environmental or reliability testing becomes a question of sample size at some point.
It’s probably the most common question I hear as a reliability engineer – how many samples do we need. [Read more…]