Creating an Effective Reliability Plan Writing and executing effective reliability plans is a skill that is not often taught in reliability courses or seminars. It falls under the body of knowledge of reliability management, which is a different set of skills than reliability engineering. What is a Reliability Plan, and how should it be developed? […]

Selecting the Right Reliability Tools There are dozens of quality and reliability tools. How does a reliability practitioner know which specific tools to use in a new reliability program. Should reliability allocation be used? Which types of FMEAs are needed? What about robust design or design margin analysis? How does one go about selecting the […]

An Introduction, Basic Steps, and Examples of How FMEA Goes Wrong Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) starts with brainstorming and ends with prioritized actions. A great tool to get your team thinking about system failures. Let’s explore the fundamental steps and beset practices to get value from your analysis. You may hear moans and groans […]

An Introduction, Basic Steps, and Examples of FRACAS Gone Wrong Every failure has valuable information you and your team require to improve reliability. During the development process, each failure may represent a future recall. Celebrate every failure. Let your FRACAS prioritize which failures to resolve. Failures occur, sometimes a bit too often. Some failures may […]

Do Reliability Testing That Adds Value, Informs Decisions, and Provides Information Reliability testing is expensive, time-consuming, and fraught with errors. Is it worth the effort? Is it necessary? Let’s explore relegating testing to only a ‘when necessary’ status. Let’s explore what you and your team can do instead. Testing results arrive late in the development […]

The Importance of Reliability Apportionment and How to Do It Today Your team may understand the system reliability goal, yet they should know the goal for the element they are addressing. Let’s discuss why you must do reliability apportionment. Plus, let’s explore how it benefits your team. There are a few methods for reliability apportionment. […]

Basic Steps to Building Your Reliability Plan Creating a plan is necessary both for budgeting and buy-in. The added focus on reliability will help your team achieve it’s reliability goals. Plus, a good plan helps build your credibility and program. Let’s explore how to build a reliability plan. First, no two reliability plans are the […]

What To Do When A Customer Requests MTBF You have carefully crafted a detailed reliability goal including function, environment, probability, and duration, plus apportioned it to critical supplied subsystems and components. Your vendor decides to use MTBF instead. What can you do? What should you do? The supplier is critical to the success of the […]

Time to Failure Data Analysis for Your Factory Equipment We have data. Often, an abundance of data concerning equipment failures. Failures per month or MTBF-type measures do not reveal sufficient insights to understand the pattern of failures. We need to know if the rate of failures is increasing or not and if the maintenance program […]

Collecting and Analyzing Your Field Data We often have more data than we can use. For time to failure, warranty claims, and related field data, we should take the time to learn what we can. Let’s explore organizing your field data and use basic techniques let the data speak. What kind and where can you […]