At one time or another all of us have been the “new” reliability engineer on the block. You have been given a set of expectations from your boss to either ensure that your product is 1)”good enough” and ready for production or 2) will meet the expected “reliability”. So as the “newly” minted reliability engineer where do you start?
In this blog we will discuss tools/best practices for the “new or seasoned” reliability guru to guide you on your journey. So, to get things started just what exactly is reliability engineering anyway?
One definition is as follows: Reliability engineering is the function of analyzing the expected or actual reliability of a product, process or service, and identifying actions to reduce failures or mitigate their effect. In addition to this definition, reliability engineering can be done by reliability engineers, design engineers, quality engineers, or system engineers.
The overall goal of reliability engineering is to make your product more reliable in order to reduce repairs, lower costs, and to maintain your company’s reputation. In essence reliability engineering should be done at all levels across the product development life cycle.
Any and all opinions are welcome as we kick-off this blog on “Best Practices” and if you have a differing view on what is reliability engineering I’d be glad to hear from you on this site.
As a Reliability Engineer I am now focusing on developing a Design Review process for my company. This makes great sense since reliability engineering tends to focus on how and why things fail, so applying the knowledge and experince we gain in this role as early in the design process as possible can have the greatest effect at the lowest cost.
What are others doing in design review?
Reliability Engineering is not only the study and application of life data analysis but is a philosophy of prevention and continuous improvement. The BOK of reliability not only covers the classical distribution fitting and prediction models but covers various other aspects of product design. In my role as Design Quality Engineer the Definition of Functional Specifications, Determination of Usage Conditions and the Design FMEA are crtitically important tools used by myself and other reliability engineers, because it allows us to get ahead the the design curve and product life cycle to impact the ability of the product or service to actually meet its intended function over time in stated conditions. By predicting and modeling the issues during the design phase and testing phase of product development can we ever hope to meet or exceed customer expections. Quality after the fact by inspection or warranty is a waste of company time and resources when the real benefit is at the start of the project with designed in reliability and quality. As a famous author once said. “Properly designed machines work propertly and don’t require testing, Only machines designed by bunglers require testing.”
I fully agree with Micheal Smith in that reliability engineering as`applied to design, I like the term DFR (Design for Reliability), is more of a philoshophy of product design than just data analysis. The criticality of analysis of customer usage and enviromntal conditions cannot be stressed more.
Thanks for the post, please keep them coming
Great site, I will be back. Well done