Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
In reliability engineering and data-driven maintenance strategies, understanding different failure modes is crucial for designing robust systems. Survival analysis is a powerful statistical tool that allows us to analyze time-to-event data and assess the reliability of components over time. In this article, we’ll explore how survival analysis can be applied to multi-modal failure scenarios using R.
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Accelerated life testing, ALT, is a method used in reliability engineering to assess the lifespan and performance of a product under accelerated stress conditions. The goal is to uncover potential faults and failures in a shorter time frame than would be possible under normal operating conditions. ALT is particularly useful when the product’s expected lifespan is long and waiting for failures to occur naturally is not feasible.
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After a discussion with a client this morning, and their motor vendor’s reliability engineer asked for a reference for a sample size calculation formula I recommended, I had a short email exchange with said reliability engineer. In my note with the references, I included an aside with a link to this site. He liked the site and agreed that MTBF was often misunderstood and not useful. He asked if the store sold much in the way of NoMTBF logo’ed merchandise – it doesn’t btw. I thought about how and why this site and the store exist and that invited my passion on this topic once again.
We need to do something to further the eradication of MTBF.
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In the end it‟s the people „on the shopfloor‟ who have the task of making the products and keeping the machines going which produce the goods that the business sells. If you have the wrong people in the wrong places, if they are under trained and under motivated, then you will not turn the profits that the operation is capable of delivering. You may even have a disaster on your hands with people destroying economic value faster than they make it.
How to get the very best performance from people, developing great attitudes, motivating them to continually strive to improve themselves and their work is what you will learn in this one-day workshop.
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How to distinguish a renewal process from a “generalized” renewal process? Compare observed monthly returns vs. actuarial returns forecasts using actuarial return rate estimates of TTFF and TBF (Time To First Failure and Time Between Failures). A geophysicist masquerading as an Apple reliability engineer said, “It’s too hard to figure out the probability that a return came from a computer made in an earlier year.” It’s harder if returns could be second, third, or???
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“Inspect and repair as required” are well intentioned but make up what is usually an ill-informed instruction to maintenance workers. On 10 April 2024, our Principal Consultant, James Reyes-Picknell, delivered a 1 hour “lunch and learn” webinar for PEMAC – Canada’s Asset Management Association. The subject is inspired by the words often seen in work orders that often lead to a whole lot of unnecessary misery. There’s a long introduction by PEMAC, which I strongly encourage my readers to join if you are not already a member. The content of the presentation begins at: 10:49.
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People! People in positions of authority wish for popularity, they may demand respect in one way or another but, above all, being trusted is perhaps the most desirable. Trust, they say, needs to be won, respect is awaited expectantly but not necessarily given enjoyably, and popularity is fleeting. In the absence of trust and respect, and despite any feelings of friendship or congeniality, toxic environments can prevail even though their obnoxiousness is well known as is the souring effect on human relationships.
Everything, at some point, involves people and relationships of some sort will develop in one way or another. Psychologically speaking, relationships are based on individuals and their personal needs or desires for socialising and maintaining both a physical and emotional balance. The same is also true of groups of people.
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Ever wondered how often you should perform preventive maintenance tasks? In just 31 seconds, learn the key concept of Useful Life and how it determines the intervals for Scheduled Replacement and Scheduled Restoration tasks. And learn that Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) does not govern how often you do them.
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Effective time management is crucial for maintenance managers, who are responsible for overseeing maintenance operations, coordinating schedules, and ensuring that equipment and facilities are well-maintained. In this blog, we’ll explore some essential time management skills that can help maintenance managers optimize their productivity and achieve their goals.
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Institute of Quality and Reliability is happy to release this second video on ANOVA! Viewers need to watch our video ANOVA Part-1 before watching this video. In this video, Hemant Urdhwareshe explains One-way ANOVA calculations using Sum of Squares on Excel. Hemant is a Fellow of ASQ and is certified by ASQ as Six Sigma Master Black Belt, CQE, CRE and CMQ/OE.
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It takes months or years of presentations to make a big decision. The relationships of interacting parts and people will change. Some uncertainties will become more certain, while others will emerge. Ethics are the way we make decisions and, therefore, are the one thing that propels us through our journey. The FINESSE fishbone diagram provides the seven essential elements for effective communication for big decisions. Playing on the theme of a fish, a fish’s tail fin provides it with propulsion. Let’s explore the tail fin of the FINESSE fishbone diagram.
Sometimes, non reliability practitioners assume that a Reliability Analysis is just about “tossing” a distribution at a set of data. It is a little bit more complex than this. There needs to be some sort of engineering validation on the final outcome. The question to be asked is: “does this life model used make engineering sense?” This article highlights the importance of choosing the correct statistical distribution. The alternative leads to flawed decision making and can be detrimental especially when dealing with critical equipment or million-dollar decisions. A worked example is also provided.
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[updated January 2025]
Just answered a question on where to find reliability engineering training on basics and statistics. There are plenty of options and below I’m listing just where to find the many, many options available to you.
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Highly Accelerated Stress Screening (HASS) and Highly Accelerated Stress Audit (HASA) are advanced testing methods used to identify potential defects in full assemblies, while burn-in testing is typically applied at the component level. These tests are designed to expose products to extreme conditions to precipitate failures, allowing for corrective actions before the products reach customers.
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If your organisation is suffering from performance issues despite what you consider well-executed strategies, plans, and initiatives, then you have a range of roadblocks holding you back.
Typically, when organisations are losing market share or not making achieving their revenue targets, the first thing they do is to change their goals, strategy, mission, structure, vision, values etc, and even their plans.
Looking externally seems to be the easiest when organisations are suffering a range of performance challenges that they want to improve.
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