Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Let's have an in-depth discussion during the live webinar series events: Reliability Engineering Basics, Statistics, Accelerated Testing, Program Assessment, and Improvement. Catch up or review past events below.
To attend an upcoming live event, visit the Live Events section of the site, which lists the available upcoming webinars. Recordings are available via recorded videos or audio only via the podcast show.
Find one that looks interesting and register for the event. You will receive login directions and reminders prior to the event. Plus you will be able to join the discussion during the event.
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 have heard of Statistical Process Control (SPC), 6-sigma, Shewhart, the Japanese Economic Miracle, XÌ… – R Charts … or perhaps none of them. So, if you have heard of these things (and are confused by them) or if you are involved in ‘processes’ (especially manufacturing), then this webinar might help you out. [Read more…]
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…]
What is ‘supportability?’ Easy! It’s the ability of your product, system or service to be supported. But how do we get this so wrong so often? Well, the first way is by thinking that supportability is actually some activity where you work out how many spares you need to have on your shelf to last a year (for example). But what if your product, system, or service fails so often and is so difficult to repair that it needs LOTS of spare parts? Working this out doesn’t make it more supportable. Another way people get supportability wrong is by thinking about it AFTER you have designed something. How is this wrong? Well … supportability needs to be DESIGNED INTO your product, system, or service. [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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Once we have made something really reliable (or really available) … then comes the part where we have to work out how many of them we need (if they make up a fleet) or how many spare parts we need to keep them running. That is where discrete distributions are really helpful. They assign probabilities to ‘discrete’ random variables. These are random variables that can only have certain specified values. Like whole numbers. For example … the number of failures you expect to see in a mission. Or the number of available systems out of a given fleet size. If this sounds like something that could help you out … see you for this webinar!
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What role does ‘wishful thinking’ play in interpreting reliability test results? Hopefully, none. A well-designed test will likely provide meaningful results. You and your team may not like the results, yet the results will be clear. [Read more…]
OK … that is a little macabre. However, reliability engineers need to ask themselves this question a lot. And there are a lot of wrong answers out there. Some textbooks say that it is ‘commonly accepted’ to use this thing called the exponential distribution. Other books say that if the ‘Weibull shape parameter is 6 or greater … redesign!’ Do you have any idea what this means? If not, this webinar will be a nice little introduction for you!
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Reliable products are also green. This is a relatively simple argument: If an item is designed and built well, it lasts a long time, thus avoiding landfills. Years ago, when living in northern Bavaria, the apartment had a full bedroom set. The entire set was both beautiful and functional. When asked about the furniture, I learned it was over 300 years old. [Read more…]
Reliability testing is expensive. For that expense, the testing results should provide timely, meaningful results. Results that provide actionable information and insights.
The idea of running a set of standard tests or tests that we ‘commonly run’ in many cases has little value. Each test (experiment) should be conducted for specific reasons related to the current project and current knowledge. [Read more…]
There comes a time in everyone’s reliability ‘journey’ when it is either too hard or too expensive to keep perfecting your product, system, or service. Steel can only be ‘so’ pure. Clearances can only be ‘so’ accurate. Surfaces can only be ‘so’ smooth. And software can only be ‘so’ perfect. In fact, it might turn out to be better and cheaper to have two ‘average’ components, with one acting as a backup to the other. The ‘premium’ component might be too expensive or otherwise not as reliable as the backup system. Welcome to fault tolerance! This is where we design products, systems, or services to be able to handle faults, imperfections, deviations, errors, and lots of other things. [Read more…]
