Reliability goals or objectives are just a starting point.
You goals represent your target at one point in time.
At best they represent what your customers expect for reliability performance at one point in time.
When goals are set well, they anticipate what your customer expects when they receive your product. In a perfect world, you customer will find the reliability performance just a bit better than expected.
It’s not a perfect world. Continue reading
A great question will lead to more questions. Ask great questions.
When judging an elementary school science fair, one student stood out. Not because her poster was elegant, nor that she discovered some delightful insight, it was her question. More so it was her way of asking questions.
Her project examined whether soccer practice really helped. Did ball handling and shooting drills help her during the game when the skills had to be second nature? She did an experiment to explore the ability of muscle memory with and without specific sports training. Continue reading
Organizations around the world are recognizing the value of reliability engineering. Or, they are realizing that creating a durable product that delights the customer is good for business.
Another contributor to the interest in reliable products is the news of recalls. One recall not only distrupts the normal course of business, it may alter the future of the company. It may cause the collapse of the organization. Some do better than others, yet a major, in the news, recall is something to avoid. Creating a reliable product helps. Continue reading
In a recent Seth Godin blog, Counting beans he talks about the eventual costs of little compromises. The immediate benefit may be celebration worthy, yet
But overlooked are the unknown costs over time, the erosion in brand, the loss in quality, the subtraction from something that took years to add up.
There are many paths to becoming a reliability engineer.
If you are good with statistics, enjoy the detective work of failure analysis, or simply want to create a durable long lasting product, you likely found yourself in a reliability engineering role.
A science or engineering background is a great start. Time spent working with a design or maintenance team certainly help. An advanced degree in reliability engineering is another path. Continue reading