#464 – THE MEANING OF A FAILURE – FRED SCHENKELBERG

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Every failure provides information. It provides time to failure, stress strength relationship, process stability and design margin types of information. In every case. Even failures directly related to human error.

A hardware intermittent failure observed by a firmware engineer should not be dismissed. Rather recorded, explored and examined. Continue reading

#463 – HOW TO CONNECT RELIABILITY GOALS TO BUSINESS OBJECTIVES – FRED SCHENKELBERG

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Reliability goals provide you and your team a focus for the reliability program. They provide a measurable way to design, test, and maintain systems that meet customer expectations.

A goal of any kind in a business is relatively easy to set and publish. They are not easy to entwine into the culture of the organization so the objectives desired by achieving the goal become a meaningful focus. A product development team may have hundreds of pages of specifications and a long list of priorities and objectives. Simple listing a reliability goal, no matter how clearly stated, may not be sufficient to garner the interest of your team. Continue reading

#462 – SUPPLIER RELIABILITY – FRED SCHENKELBERG

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It’s Friday afternoon and the phone rings. It is another customer complaining about your product not working. This is the fifth call this afternoon. Something is wrong and you’re responsible for making it right.

The natural failure analysis process starts across your team. Gather information, determine the scope of the issue, work to understand the root causes, and implement an appropriate solution. This may involve stopping production, halting shipments, or even a product recall. Continue reading

#461 – PURPOSE OF ENGINEERING TOLERANCES – FRED SCHENKELBERG

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The short answer is, everything varies.

The longer answer involves the agreement between what is possible and what is desired.

If we could design a product and it could be replicated exactly, including every element of the product, we would not need tolerances. Any part would work with any assembly. We would simply specify the dimensions required.

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#460 – 2 DESIGN APPROACHES TO CREATING A RELIABLE PRODUCT – FRED SCHENKELBERG

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There are two basic philosophies when creating a reliability plan for a new product or system.

One is to experiment with prototypes as quickly and often as possible, the build, test, fix, approach. Or, you can research and model detailed aspects of the materials and structures to characterize the strength of a product or system, the analytical approach. Continue reading