Fred Schenkelberg — Thought Leader

Some time ago, earlier in my career, I worked for a wonderful boss. She would stop by my office on occasion and ask ‘what’s new?’ or “how’s it going?’ Just a check-in. I often let her know about the current vexing problem I was struggling with at the moment.

The funny thing is she never directly solve the problem for me. She certainly could have. Instead, she would ask a couple of questions that always helped me to find the solution. This happened with problems concerning dealing with a difficult person, strange material properties, motivating change within a group, or finding someone that could design and run a computational fluid dynamic model for me.

It was her questions the helped. She did this in meetings, in presentations, and when she swung by my office for a chat. [Read more…]

In a recent blog post, Seth Goin discussed the need for ongoing investment to maintain infrastructure. Whether a road or building or even your own skills, it takes regular care to avoid system failures or obsolesce. [Read more…]

Statistical process control, SPC, is a set of tools to enable monitoring the stability of a process. SPC is also the first step to checking process capability with measures such as Cpk. Many consider SPC a quality or manufacturing tool. Yet, having and maintaining a stable process is also essential to creating a reliable product. Let me explain why. [Read more…]

Very few reliability decisions are made by reliability engineers. Yet, reliability engineers are asked many questions concerning reliability. How reliable will this design be for customers? How will the system likely fail? How many failures should we expect next month?

How you answer these and the many other questions received does impact the reliability of your product or system. The information provided those that ask reliability related questions, with useful and practical information, can make better decisions which improves reliability performance.

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An immediate purpose is to earn a living. You also may suggest the work is to improve the reliability of the product or system. Reduce downtime, reduce warranty, increase profit, etc.

That is fine for the overall purpose of reliability engineering work, yet in the day to day work, the specific task level, what is the purpose behind what we do?

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Yesterday had the chance to review the long list of Design for X topics. Assembly, environment, maintainability, and of course reliability, plus about a dozen other areas of focus. How is a design team to navigate all these different sets of constraints and objectives along with crafting a solution that works?

With a little creativity, you could relate every Design for X topic to reliability. Easier to assembly, fewer assembly errors leading to field failures, for example.

Another way to think about the Design for X space is to consider a superset instead. What are all these design considerations really about? What is common, including the design for reliability topic? With a little thought, it seems clear to me that we all are really considering how to identify and manage risk. [Read more…]

“Speak with Data!” commanded my former general manager. “Let the Data Sing” is an article I wrote long ago. We all have data, often too much data. We like to present based on what the data says. Yet, sometimes the speaking with data is not clear.

If you’ve done the data gathering, the analysis, the summary, all based on the data, how can you best reveal what the data says to enhance your results and recommendations?

Just because you can add a 3D pie chart doesn’t mean you should. Crafting meaningful charts is only one part of the puzzle. You also have to present the data in a clear and meaningful manner. Here is a set of suggestions to consider the next time you are preparing and presenting when data is involved. [Read more…]

As reliability professionals, we have a lot to do. Risks to identify, failures to analyze. Plans to draft, numbers to crunch. Meetings, writing, research, and leading fill the day.

The list of tasks that you have before you each day is impressive and daunting. So, how do you focus on what actually requires your attention and not just the tasks that get your attention?

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If we set a product reliability goal of 99% reliable over two years in the requirements document, what are we supposed to do tomorrow? On the other hand, if our goal is to write 1,000 pages for the next great novel by the end of the year and we have no pages written so far, well, we should write a page or two tomorrow.

A good goal provides a vision, a measurable milestone, a target. What it lacks is what we do from now till achieving that goal. If the goal is 1,000 pages in 365 days, we may want to set up a process to write at least 3 pages per day.

So, given a reliability goal, what do we do tomorrow, next week, and each week between now and when the goal is due?

A Good Reliability Goal

In previous work, I’ve written about setting reliability goals, connecting the goal to customer expectations, technical capability, and business needs. Plus, have written about the four (five) parts of a complete goal, including Function(s), Environment, Duration, and Probability (and all four continue to get more difficult as customers expect more).

A well-stated reliability goal provides direction and a measurable target for the entire team. It provides a basis to compare progress and to help frame “is the design reliable enough yet” discussions.

This is all well and good, yet is it enough? [Read more…]