Education options have exploded. For the past 75 years we read books, gone back to campus, attended workshops, traveled to conferences, and participated in evening meetings. Today we have more options from more sources for our professional development.

A webinar where we discuss the ASQ Certified Reliability Engineer exam and you can best prepare to receive your certificate

You may already know my position on MTBF. If not, in short, do not use MTBF at all, ever, in any form. So what should we use instead. I suggest using reliability, the probability of success over a specific duration. Let’s discuss what will work for you.

Early and often during product development the team needs to know the expected reliability performance of the current design.

Selecting as supplier for components or subsystems involved many aspects including the desired reliability performance. Once selected the ability of the supplier to provide items that meet or exceed the reliability requirements relies on their understanding of the requirements and operational conditions related to the specific item within the system. It also relies on the suppliers knowledge of their own design and manufacturing processes as it related to the reliability performance.

A common request of reliability professionals is to design a set of reliability tests. Many rely on various standards such as 85°C / 85%RH, to determine if a system is reliable, yet the standards do not provide a means to translate the results to your specific situation.

When components fall outside specs the chance for quality and reliability issue increases. Let’s explore a couple of design and manufacturing cases where effectively using statistical process control will enhance your product’s reliability performance.

Tolerance specification communicates the allowance for part variation. Variation happens, and when within what we expect, great. Otherwise, quality and reliability issues ensue. Let’s explore how to properly set tolerances to improve reliability.

We work on projects to improve reliability. There may not be the field data immediately available. Let’s explore what you can do to improve the overall program while delivering on your project. Specifically, what’s with cost and procurement?

How do you use the Weibull Distribution? It’s just one of many useful statistical distribution we have to master as reliability engineers. Let’s explore an array of distribution and the problems they can help solve in our day to day work.