A month ago, I received a question, “Why the castles for the artwork?” It was not the first time someone wondered why we use line drawings of old stone building features or sketches of castle layouts. It is safe to say it was and remains a purposeful artwork selection to promote community around Accendo Reliability.
Branding and Community
Branding is not the specialty of a reliability engineer, yet knowing a little about branding certainly helps. Branding is more than a logo or catchphrase. It includes the product’s look, feel, and voice. Accendo Reliability provides a service in two ways. First, provide articles, episodes, webinars, and more for your professional development. Second, it provides a place to share your knowledge with your peers.
The community part is shown in the exchanges of questions, comments, support, and discussions. It is, in part, our ability to learn and make a difference. It is, in part, our ability to share and earn the respect of our peers.
The artwork we use across the site and emails has a look and feel that is unique and recognizable. We chose the artwork at first because it did not represent any modern industries. It was old, study, resilient. Stone structures and castles often last a long time. They rely on craftsmanship and honest materials.
Today, we continue to use this artwork, as it has become a recognizable site element. If you see a line drawing of a stone arch or clocktower, you know it is from Accendo Reliability. It is that brand recognition that invites you to participate in the community.
How to Choose a Community
In a recent blog post, Seth Godin wrote about how to select the best college to attend. The primary audience was 17-year-olds considering which institutions to select for their college education. His advice is simple and applies to choosing which community to engage with.
Quoting from the post:
- Are the people this place attracts the sort of people I want to spend time with and become more like?
- Is the system that is in place here one that pushes and cajoles and processes people to become more like the kind of person I’d like to be?
A college is a community of people. And each college is unique in how the staff and your peers make decisions and behave. It is not about large stone buildings or football team accomplishments that should be the basis for engaging with a particular college community. Selecting a college is about the place being a good fit for you and them.
Is Accendo Reliability the Right Community for You?
Accendo Reliability is a community, one of many available for you to choose for your reliability engineering professional development. We all have many options available, and Accendo Reliability often recommends and promotes the many options out there. We think this is part of what makes Accendo Reliability unique.
From the conversations and comments I’ve seen, I believe Accendo Reliability attracts the people I want to spend time with. We tend to be curious problem solvers who focus on adding value while supporting the creation of reliable products and processes. We also enjoy talking about how things may or have failed.
Second, the systems at Accendo Reliability, from free access to practical and useful content to listings and recommendations for webinars, podcasts, books, and courses, ensure you know your many options to learn and share your knowledge. A core system at Accendo Reliability is when you ask questions; we provide an answer or directions to find an answer.
Reliability and Accendo Reliability
You can count on your peers at Accendo Reliability to provide content you can use to improve your career and your organization’s ability to create reliable products and systems and to answer your questions. Engagement in the community at Accendo Reliability does not require walking through large castle doors; it does encourage you to read, listen, watch, and use that information to make a difference.
You are part of the community already, especially when you comment, like, share, and help others learn about reliability engineering. I encourage you to continue participating in this community, and I look forward to your contributions.
Please use the comment section below to add your thoughts, recommendations, and questions (even about the site’s artwork) as we continue to build a reliability engineering community with you.
Thanks so much for your insights, Fred. Without a doubt, Accendo is the best reliability community online. And the castles are a bonus. Best wishes to you for another great year at Accendo Reliability.
Thanks Ray. Much appreciate the kind words. cheers, Fred
Hello,
I’ve just recently joined the community and love all the reliability knowledge. Today, I have a question about repairable systems reliability!
I operate in a realm of repairable-ish systems from a new product development perspective. What I mean by that is in the NPD process, life testing is conducted in different phases/prototypes of the project. During this testing some of the failures that occur, in early stages, could be considered as repairable. The failure is fixed and testing continues on to gain understanding of the systems proceeding failures.
In the field, our product could be considered as non-repairable due to warranty claim lead times, users unable to fix items themselves, etc.
My question is on how one is able to evaluate a system from a repairable system perspective in development and relate it back to a non-repairable systems target that is established? I want to understand if the reliability growth analysis that can be done could be related back to a target established using the non-repairable analysis. From all I have researched, it is quite hard to relate the two together.
Hi Caleb.
Good question(s)! Let’s start at the start.
The common thread between a system that is on one day considered repairable, Ave on the next is not … is the ‘hazard rate.’ That is, the rate at which a working product fails.
We feed the hazard rate into what is called a ‘non-homogenous Poisson process’ to model the frequency of those repairable failures … if the system is considered REPAIRABLE.
We feed the hazard rate into an equation that gives us the reliability function … if the system is considered NON-REPAIRABLE.
So you can model failures that you repair during development to find the hazard rate to then create a reliability function to understand how it behaves when it is non-repairable.
However! You mentioned ‘reliability growth.’ Everything I have said above is based on your product not fundamentally changing as it transitions from repairable to non-repairable. Reliability growth means your product is changing (for the better).
Modeling reliability growth relies on not just fixing failures, but implementing ‘corrective actions’ to design out the root cause of that failure. This means you can model the improvement in average hazard rate (or MTBF if you like) … but there are lots of articles and webinars in Accendo that talk about how knowing nothing but the MTBF gives you precious little understanding of reliability in a non-repairable context.
The big thing that is missing in your question is … what decision(s) are you trying to inform? … and once you have these worked out, do you need to understand warranty reliability, service life reliability or something else?
Working this out really helps you then work out what you need to analyze.
I hope some of this helps.