Yesterday had the chance to review the long list of Design for X topics. Assembly, environment, maintainability, and of course reliability, plus about a dozen other areas of focus. How is a design team to navigate all these different sets of constraints and objectives along with crafting a solution that works?
With a little creativity, you could relate every Design for X topic to reliability. Easier to assembly, fewer assembly errors leading to field failures, for example. Continue reading
At the heart of every ‘design for… something’ is an attempt to avoid uncertainty. By exerting conscious effort to consider a set of considerations or constraints, the design process attempts to avoid the downside of missing something deemed important. Or, they are attempting to include features and capabilities to enhance a product. Continue reading
An immediate purpose is to earn a living. You also may suggest the work is to improve the reliability of the product or system. Reduce downtime, reduce warranty, increase profit, etc.
That is fine for the overall purpose of reliability engineering work, yet in the day to day work, the specific task level, what is the purpose behind what we do? Continue reading
As I’ve said before, ‘Reliability occurs at the point of decision’. When an engineer selects one material type versus another, or one component versus another, or a vendor over another, those are decisions. These decision directly impact the product’s reliability performance.
Implied within each decision is a question. For example, when deciding on a vendor to provide power supplies, the underlying question is ‘which vendor should we select in this situation?’ We make decisions to resolve questions concerning optimizations, comparisons, objectives, measurements, preventions, priorities, and resources. Continue reading
Some time ago when talking with someone I just met, the conversation turned to what we did for a living. I mentioned being a reliability engineer, and his response: “Oh, yes, we do reliability”. Curious, as I’m not sure that I ‘do reliability’, we then talked about what he meant.
The conversation revealed that they had a list of tasks that they accomplished for each product under development. They did tests and reviews of the results. A lot of testing. They did FMEA and HALT. He believed the engineers did derating or stress/strength calculation. He didn’t know about process stability with vendors or internal manufacturing lines. Continue reading