Derating can be defined as a policy of deliberately understressing components to provide increased reliability. When properly incorporated into a design process, derating can make a significant contribution to reliability. Continue reading
Most everyone agrees that improving a product or process reliability is a good thing. It’s good for customers, factories, and our business. And sometimes it’s difficult to answer the question,
‘What is the value of that reliability activity?’ Continue reading
In a previous posting (#51, posted on June 13, 2014), I discussed product reliability, reliability engineering, and reliability management. But this Holy Trinity of reliability does not operate in a vacuum. To create a sustainable reliability program within an organization requires an understanding of its culture as well as its structure. Continue reading
Reliability is not the sole responsibility of the reliability engineer but results from nearly everyone in an organization making decisions that move toward the desired product reliability performance. Continue reading
Failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA) is a tool that works to prevent process and product problems before they occur.
I like to define FMEA’s as an organized brainstorm. The process examines a product or process and asks what could go wrong. Then the team systematically determines and rank orders for each failure mode: – the severity of the problem when it occurs – the probability of the problem occurring – the ability to detect the problem before it occurs. Continue reading