Sometimes making an assumption is a good thing. You can achieve more with less. A well-placed assumption saves you time, work, and worry. The right assumption may even be left unstated: It’s so good that no one questions it.
Have you ever assumed that the failures for a system follow an exponential distribution? Did you assume that tallying up the total hours and dividing by the number of failures was appropriate? Did you even check? Continue reading
Imagine you are requested to assist a design team in determining how to best improve the reliability of a product. You learn that the organization produces a range of point of sale (POS) devices and they have invited you to a meeting to discuss the product and ways to improve the field reliability. Continue reading
The reliability target, objective, mission, or goal is the statement that provides a design team with focus and direction. A well-stated goal will establish the business connection to the technical decisions related to product durability expectations, while providing clarity across the organization and enabling a common language for discussing design, supply chain, and manufacturing decisions. Continue reading
In my job as a reliability professional, I often encounter circumstances in which a company sets reliability goals that appear to have been met and yet the fielded product fails to perform as reliably as expected. Such a disconnect can have a number of causes, so let’s look at an example. Continue reading
An essential element of any successful reliability program is the notion that all reliability activity relates to decisions. If you are performing a highly accelerated life test (HALT) only because it is listed on the product development guidelines or because it was carried over from the last program’s plan, and the HALT results are not part of the design improvement decision-making process, then you probably should not be doing so. Continue reading