Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
It is not enough to have a good mind; it is more important to use it well. — Descartes
Learning and Value
Over the past week, I’ve received a couple of questions about the pursuit of a graduate degree in reliability engineering and about preparing for the CRE. One question was particularly interesting – how will a reliability engineering graduate degree or CRE help my career? [Read more…]
Running through a couple of practice CRE exams recently (yeah, I know I should get out more…) found a few formulas kept coming up in the questions. While it is not a complete list of equation you’ll need for the exam, the following five will help in many of the questions. They seem popular maybe because the relate to key concepts in the body of knowledge, or they are easy to use in question creation. I do not know why. [Read more…]
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 11,000 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 18 years to get that many views.
Once again those with a CRE are at or near the top of the salaries reported in this survey. See more at http://www.qualityprogress.com/salarysurvey
I never did like taking final exams in college as I viewed them as four hours I would rather spend doing something (anything) else. An exam is a check of what you know about a topic or subject. We prepared for those exams by reading, studying, practicing working problems (doing homework) and trying to understand the key concepts, trends, themes, etc. Some of my classmates thought it was about how much they could stuff into short term memory, others though sleep deprivation had something to do with preparing for an exam. [Read more…]
Hi all,
I’m asking for feedback here. I’m thinking about building a subscription service that sends the subscriber a CRE preparation question a day (maybe adjustable by subscriber … not sure how to do this yet). [Read more…]
note: if you know of a great online resource that isn’t on this list, please add a comments and we’ll add it to the list for all to share.
Shon Isenhour recently posted on Linkedin a question about online resources helpful for reliability engineers. I added my list and hadn’t seen any other links added. There must be more than the few I know about – what can you add to this list? [Read more…]
This week in our CRE Test Prep class/webinar we covered the Advance Statistics section of the CRE Primer, and I felt great that we stayed an hour more going over these though topics.
One of the topics was Hypothesis Testing.
Let me share some of the questions that arose during that section. [Read more…]
A guest post by Andrew O’Connor, of Relken Engineering Pty Ltd
Common Cause Failures (CCF) is one of the reasons why a classical reliability model of your system may dangerously underestimate the risk of failure. It directly attacks the benefits of providing redundancy by creating a single point of failure. In fact, studies have shown that CCF events may contribute between 20% – 80% of the unavailability of safety systems within nuclear reactors [Werner 1994]. This post will “Describe this type of failure (also known as common cause mode failure) and how it affects design for reliability. (Understand)” [CRE BOK III.A.4] [Read more…]
In a recent LinkedIn post a fellow Reliability Engineer is asking the Reliability Engineering community in how to prepare for the CRE exam. Rapidly everyone is recommending books, study groups, and training courses. My recommendation to anyone taking the CRE exam is to be very familiar with your approved ASQ calculator. Here is a link that I found in [Read more…]
The CRE_Errata_9-26-2011_revised document is in pdf format and contains a couple of typos noted by John Cooper in the Indiana Council CRE prep materials – he has taught the CRE Prep course for Ops A La Carte and is a pretty good teacher and a CRE. [Read more…]
Recently a colleague sent me a published copy of the first CRE exam. Scanning through the document suggests that a few things have changed and many have not changed at all. I often comment my enjoyment of the reliability engineering profession, as it doesn’t change too fast and even I can keep up. [Read more…]
A part of the preparation for the ASQ CRE is experience and education. These, in my simple way of thinking, means applying what you have learned to solve problems and provide value. Reliability engineering is about two questions: [Read more…]
Update:
I forwarded the note below to QCI for comment and asked if they have an errata available. They do.
The QCI errata is posted on [the] website. [Read more…]
The annual salary survey done by American Society for Quality (ASQ) is summarized in the December 2011 issue. And, the good news is a CRE certification provides approximately a $21k salary premium over those in similar positions without the certification. Based on Table 2. salary premiums for certification holders in the article, Land the Big One, indicated the largest premium is [Read more…]