Welcome to Accendo Reliability – join us and learn the art and craft of reliability engineering.
As I started my career, I focused on mastering the tools. My first accelerated test plan and results used a Wiener diffusion model and non-linear regression techniques. Presenting the methods and results, my boss asked, “What does it mean to our business and customers?” Continue reading
If you buy more than one of an item used in your product, you will have to deal with variability. In general, the variability from part to part is minimal and expected. Occasionally, the variability is large and causes reliability problems.
According to O’Connor and Kleyner, “The main cause of production-induced unreliability, as well as rework and scrap, is the variability inherent in production processes.” O’Connor, Patrick D. T. and Andre Kleyner. 2012. Practical Reliability Engineering. Chicester: John Wiley and Sons. Web. Continue reading
Systems and processes exist in our dynamic world. Each organization and situation is different. Just as there is not one risk management process that works for any organization, there also is the need for continuous improvement of an existing system. Continue reading
Let’s say you have shipped 1,000 products to your customer on January 1st. All are immediately placed into service. And each month since you have received a few product returns, what we are going to call failures. We also have fitted the data to a Weibull distribution. Then in May, your boss asks you to estimate how many failures to expect in June. Continue reading
I like to say Reliability is all about quality over time. Quality professionals tend to say reliability is an element of quality. David A. Garvin of the Harvard Business School suggests there are eight dimensions to quality, including reliability.
Either way one relates quality and reliability we need to remember that quality or reliability are not a department, team, the engineering down the hall. Quality and reliability are part of the culture of the organization. It is how we make decisions the impact how the product or service performs for customers. Continue reading