Early in my career, I worked for an unreasonable person.
He wanted us, his engineering staff, to show him the data. He wanted us to gather, monitor, analyze and display data regularly. Anytime we needed approval, funding, or resources he wanted to see the data.
Essentially this meant he wanted to understand the situation involved. 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.
As a reliability professional, I often find it necessary to explore ways to leverage my knowledge of these areas to change the culture within an organization to create a sustainable program that achieves reliable products time and again. Continue reading
As reliability engineers, we have a large number of tools available.
From project planning, system modeling, data analysis, test planning, to risk identification and defect discovery, we have techniques, procedures, algorithms to help us identify and solve reliability problems.
We also may ways to apply an individual reliability task. Continue reading
The best time is at the product conception. The second best time as early as possible in the product development process.
It may change. Be refined. Altered later.
That is fine, yet the initial concept needs the boundary condition of a reliability goal. Continue reading
By the time a product fails in the field, the design team is focused on the next design.
They are looking to the future and not looking for field reliability feedback. We know that each failure contains valuable information.
We, as reliability professionals, often work to create as much useful information concerning failure modes and mechanisms as possible. We want to improve the design. Continue reading