Does a Certification Make You a Professional Reliability Engineer?
The short answer to this question is “No, it doesn’t.”
A certification is just a piece of paper that conveys that you have mastered some body of knowledge. You most likely also committed to abide by a code of ethics. You may also have committed to continuing education to maintain the certification. Continue reading
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