Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
An analysis, based on the reliability maturity matrix, used to ascertain the actual organizational culture around reliability-related decisions.
It was late Friday afternoon and the phone rang. Which is rarely a good thing.
There seems to a significant spike in field failures due to one component. The initial failure analysis work reveals the issue started with a batch of parts received about two months ago and the flaw continues to appear in subsequent batches. [Read more…]
“How do you know so much about our program?” was a question the quality manager asked after reading the assessment report. The assessment took one day with eight interviews.
The reliability that results is going to happen whether or not the team designing the product or production line deliberately use reliability engineering tools or not. The elements of a product or system will respond to the environment and either work or fail.
While working at Hewlett-Packard I had the opportunity to conduct reliability program assessment of about 50 product divisions. One hypothesis related the number of reliability tasks the team actively used would correlate to their warranty expenses.
That worked to a point. [Read more…]
There are two basic approaches when addressing product reliability: Reactive or Proactive. Neither is right or wrong.
The reactive approach has the limitation of responding to failures that occur during prototyping, production and customer use.
The proactive approach focuses on preventing product design, assembly, and use issues before they have the opportunity to create a product failure.
The concept of a maturity model is not new. It provides a means to identify the current state and illuminate the possible improvements to a reliability program. The matrix serves a guide to assist an organization in improving its program.
The matrix has five stages. In general, the higher stages are most cost effective and efficient at achieving higher rates of product reliability performance. These stages—uncertainty, awaking, enlightenment, wisdom, and certainty—are described in today’s post. [Read more…]