A few years ago, having been invited to evaluate reliability practices within a company, I conducted a series of interviews with various staff members. When asked any question on the reliability techniques used, members of the engineering, procurement, operations, and quality departments all responded with nearly the same comment:

“Oh, the reliability guy does that.” It appeared that the organization had a single reliability engineer who did everything related to reliability. His interview was scheduled last that day. I was looking forward to meeting him.

This sole reliability engineer supported three design teams working on similar products. He set the reliability goals, worked out the apportionment, calculated the derating and safety factors on most elements of the design, worked with vendors to secure parts for accelerated life testing, conducted highly accelerated life testing and a range of environmental testing, established any testing related to reliability for the manufacturing team, and monitored field issues, failure analysis, warranty estimates, and other aspects. He was working long days and was often unable to address all the issues that arose. He knew reliability engineering but did not have time to conduct all the tasks necessary to help produce reliable products.

He and I agreed that this situation this was neither sustainable nor beneficial to the rest of the team. Although he felt valuable and sought after by nearly everyone in the organization, the expectation was that he would do everything related to reliability. We agreed that many of the engineers and managers within the organization had the capability to take on most of the reliability work. They just needed to know how. He then sighed, lamenting in the fact that one more time-intensive task had just been added to his day.

We talked about ways to facilitate this transition. I talked to the engineering and operations managers and they agreed that they needed to spread out the work and that many of the tasks would be best done by their engineer once they learned a little more about reliability engineering.

About a month later I heard that the reliability engineer had left the group to take a new position. We talked briefly and he said that the former team meant well but never found time to learn or take on any tasks, citing the need to get the product out. “Could you do it this one time?” had become the common repetitive request. Nothing really changed. When he left, he took the entire reliability program with him.

The moral of the story should be obvious: Reliability tasks should not be relegated to a single individual but spread across a number of experts in different areas belonging to a number of different groups or teams.

Bio:

Fred Schenkelberg is an experienced reliability engineering and management consultant with his firm FMS Reliability. His passion is working with teams to create cost-effective reliability programs that solve problems, create durable and reliable products, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce warranty costs. If you enjoyed this articles consider subscribing to the ongoing series Musings on Reliability and Maintenance Topics.