Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
The reliability performance of a product or system exists because the decisions that occur during the creation of the product establish how well an item will survive without failure. The choice of material, finish, or technologies, along with all the other decisions involved, define how well a product performs, including its reliability. [Read more…]
In my opinion, as I do not know if this is true or not, every product or system failure has a cause. Causes are not exactly the same as what we call ‘failure mechanisms’, yet they are related in many cases. One more term to consider is ‘failure mode’, which refers to the symptoms or results of a failure. [Read more…]
What is it that makes the difference between good and great related to reliability engineers? What is the magic element that separates those who can carry out tasks such as facilitating an FMEA or designing and analyzing an ALT from those who impact an organization’s culture? A good impact that improves the organization’s ability to create reliable products.
Gage R&R – this is mainly a quality tool, where 10% is a pass and 10-30% is “marginal.” What does that mean, or even better yet, how can I use gage R&R to provide meaningful results in a design environment without specifications? In 30 minutes, we will discuss how you can calculate Gage discrimination – the more useful result for a design situation, and even how to use it for destructive reliability tests.
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Both reliability and maintenance activities work to reduce failures and downtime. Perfect reliability of a system would eliminate the need for maintenance. Perfect maintenance would keep even poorly designed (reliability-wise) operating.
Together, the work of reliability and maintenance professionals can achieve more than each team working separately. Each brings a set of insights and skills to the conversation. Working together means improving the design of a system so it’s easier to maintain. It also means the maintenance teams’ day-to-day observations provide meaningful information to the reliability team.
In manufacturing environments, especially in high-volume production processes, it is important to ensure the highest Machine availability rate for critical equipment as a crucial factor in achieving the expected output goals. The more the availability value there is, the better the plant’s capacity to achieve production requirements since the time available for each piece of equipment will be maximized.
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When fitting a line or curve to data, it’s a model. When modeling, it is worth remembering the George Box quote, “Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful.” Yet, how do we separate a useful model from one that isn’t useful? One step in finding a helpful regression model is to consider the residuals. BTW: Weibull analysis is another term for regression analysis. [Read more…]
In this special episode of the Maintenance Mavericks Podcast, we have Sanya Mathura, Managing Director at Strategic Reliability Solutions, on the show!
Tune in to learn how Sanya overcame the challenges she faced in the industry, how to bring value to the table, and the importance of bringing people from different backgrounds together for change.
Women in Maintenance is a special series hosted by Caitlyn Young-Gilbert, UpKeep’s Maintenance Community Founder. Caitlyn meets with a female leader in the maintenance industry to discuss their career journeys and share best practices to help other women within the maintenance industry thrive!
Is a reliable product safer? Are the safety elements of a product or system independent of its reliability performance? These and other questions speak to the complex relationship between reliability and safety.
A ‘capable’ process is a really weak term for what we are dealing with here. In short, a process is considered ‘capable’ if it creates products that, in spite of all the unavoidable natural variation in production, still fall within the boundaries of what ‘good’ looks like. Perhaps instead of ‘capable’, we should say ‘amazing’! A ‘capable’ process will essentially create products that have a very, very small chance of being defective. So how do we get here? SPC can help. But how do we measure how ‘capable’ our process is? And can we use this measurement to (for example) work out how many Parts Per Million (PPM) defects you are likely to get? This webinar introduces you to the concept of process capability, including well-known indices like CPK, along with what this means for your process. [Read more…]
Some of my best friends are quality people. This is despite the notion that reliability is just one of many quality factors, while I suggest reliability is all of quality and over time. There are a lot of similarities and common objectives with quality and reliability efforts. Plus, there are a few differences.
You may fondly, or most likely not fondly, remember your undergraduate course on probability and statistics. The calculations of various winning hands with card games were interesting and connected to the early ‘invention’ of probability and statistical methods. Yet, the jar with colored beads was rather boring. [Read more…]
Accendo Reliability has been in the works for about ten years. Counting the various iterations in effect under different names and programs, it has been longer. The idea behind the site is to provide our community with great content to help you solve problems, learn, and improve. A close second concept is to provide a platform to help you share your knowledge.
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We always tell and listen to stories—anecdotes, encounters, best practices, near misses, memories, etc. We also influence how we interpret the world through the stories we tell ourselves. Plus, we often work to alter the stories others have in their head as we work to improve reliability. [Read more…]
Besides building your product inside your customer’s facility, your product will require some form of transportation to move from your factory to your customer. When your product doesn’t work ‘out of the box’, that is considered ‘not good’ for customer satisfaction.
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