 HOW RELIABLE IS YOUR PRODUCT? 50 Ways To Improve Product Reliability
Author: Mike Silverman, Managing Partner, Ops A La Carte
This quarter's article is the first three chapters of my new book. I thought you would enjoy a sneak preview. The book comes out January 2011.
I’ve read many reliability and quality textbooks, and very few approach reliability from the practical perspective. Instead, these books are filled with theory and formulas. However, many engineers are starting with almost no knowledge on the subject of reliability and they are in need of some basic education, but even more, they need the benefit of some practical experience and guidance. I wrote this book as a helpful guide and I targeted the book at engineering professionals around the world in need of a practical guide to reliability.
I wrote this book based on my 25 years practicing reliability, including 10 years running a reliability test lab and 10 years running a reliability consulting firm called Ops A La Carte. I started Ops A La Carte because I saw the need to teach and help companies develop reliability programs. Most engineers I come across know basic concepts and have their favorite reliability techniques, but few understand how to put this into an overall reliability program.
Ops A La Carte has worked with over 500 different companies in over 100 different industries in 30 different countries, so we have the ability to provide guidance from the experiential point of view. When I use the collective term “we” in this book, I am referring to an experience we have had at Ops A La Carte.
Just like any other discipline, there is no substitute for experience. Book knowledge is a good start but until you are working on a design program or faced with a particular failure situation, you may not know what to do, or you may panic and resort to ineffective techniques you used in the past. In this book, I will show you different techniques and give you real life situations that we faced and how we used particular techniques to solve problems.
I saw a movie recently called “Eagle Eye” that is quite applicable to reliability. The movie starts off with the discovery of a possible terrorist plot. The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States consult their new supercomputer “Eagle Eye” to determine the probability that the terrorist plot is real. The supercomputer comes back with a probability of 39%. The commander in charge responded by saying “39% and probability don’t belong in the same sentence.” So true…and very appropriate for reliability as well. The next scene, the Joint Chiefs consult with the President and by this time, “Eagle Eye” collects a bit more information and raises its probability to 51%. The President then decides to take action based on this and authorizes an attack on the alleged terrorist group. What is that really telling us? In fact, a probability of 51% means that there is a 49% chance that the conclusion is incorrect based on the data.
Likewise with reliability tests, you need to make decisions based on test data from a sample of the population. You will never have enough data to be 100% certain of any decision, so you should gain as much confidence as you can with the time and money that you have. That is the art of reliability testing.
I structured the book in 50 easy to read chapters. Each chapter has some background on the reliability technique, its usefulness, and in some cases, its limitations. Also, when applicable I compare the technique in question to other techniques to show you when to use which technique. Starting in Chapter 3, I introduce the topic of Reliability Integration, and for each chapter onwards, I comment on how you can use the concept of Reliability Integration with that particular technique. I will talk a lot in this book about Reliability Integration. It is one of the most valuable takeaways from this book.
In each chapter, I will provide one or more case studies from clients we have worked with and how we utilized the specific technique in question. I didn’t use the names of people or companies but all of the case studies are real.
 CHAPTER 1: GUIDELINES, NOT RULES
Reliability is an interesting discipline because there are many techniques you can use to solve problems and create a reliable product. There certainly are guidelines and best practices, but you should determine for yourself the set of techniques that will work within your company. Some of the factors you should consider are: Size of your company, company culture, past experiences, background education, marketplace, and customer requirements.
Even though this book is filled with different techniques, don’t think you need to use them all. Everything I write in the rest of the book is in the form of guidelines and tips. You should determine for yourself which of these tips will work for you and which won’t when developing your reliability program. Also, don’t try to copy someone else’s reliability program, even if it is from the same industry, and don’t copy a reliability program from a previous company. They can be great starting places and can be very valuable input, but trying to copy one program will only get you into trouble because what makes a reliability program work has as much to do with the people involved and the culture of the organization as it does with the product that you are working on. I’ve seen two companies making almost identical products have completely different reliability programs, and both programs worked for the respective companies.
The important thing to remember is that whatever reliability program you put together should have metrics so you can measure where you are at any given time in the product development process, and the program should produce positive results.
CASE STUDY: Guidelines, Not Rules
I was performing a Reliability Assessment for a military subcontractor, and as part of the assessment I asked to see their Reliability Program Plan (RPP). Our client was so proud of the plan because of its sheer volume – it was over 100 pages! I asked the reliability engineer who wrote the plan how it came to be. He said that he picked up one of the more well-known reliability textbooks, opened up the table of contents, and made each chapter of the book a section of his plan. I looked at his plan more closely and noticed that he copied the entire plan almost verbatim. He thought that the closer he followed the book, the more successful he would be. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The plan should have a good foundation, and a reliability textbook is as good as any other source, but then the plan should be tailored to fit your particular needs. This plan obviously wasn’t. Fortunately, his customer wasn’t easily fooled and also rejected the plan.
We then worked with our client to tailor his plan to match his organization’s particular situation. His customer accepted this new plan. Our client followed the plan and developed a very reliable product.
CHAPTER 2: WHAT IS DESIGN FOR RELIABILITY (DFR)?
Reliability is no longer a separate activity performed by a distinct group within your organization. Product reliability goals, concerns and activities are integrated into nearly every function and process of your organization. Senior management’s role is to foster an environment where your team keeps reliability and quality goals clearly in mind. Engineering teams should balance project costs, customer maintenance costs, quality, schedule, performance and reliability (and possibly other factors specific to your industry) to achieve optimal product designs. Your organization’s structure should encourage all members of your team to apply appropriate reliability methods and principles. The Design for Reliability (DFR) role for the reliability personnel is often finding the cost effective components and design structures with minimal risk and then presenting this to the rest of your team.
When I got started in the reliability field in 1984, reliability seemed to be this “throw it over the wall” concept in which design engineers passed the completed design over to our reliability group. By the time we got the product, we could do little to affect the design so the reliability effort was mostly focused on measuring where we were. If the product didn’t meet its goals at that point, what could we do? We would ship the product and then spend the next several years monitoring its performance and fixing what we could. Gradually the product got better over time. Our company used our customers as the feedback mechanism. The end result was we had unhappy customers and we had a reputation for poor reliability. Unfortunately, this practice used to be very common.
In today’s global economy, so many industries are competing on reliability; we have realized that this “throw it over the wall” method can’t work anymore. Reliability should be designed in. What better way to design in reliability than to make the designers responsible for the reliability of their designs? This concept has caught on so well that today, when I lecture on DFR, my audience is largely made up of designers, not reliability engineers. The role of the reliability engineer is changing into the mentor. The reliability engineer is now responsible for going out and finding the best techniques to use and then training the designers on how to use them. The reliability engineer is responsible for writing the Reliability Program Plan (RPP), and the designers are responsible for executing the plan.
DFR is about getting the designers to take ownership of the reliability of the product. The reliability department then becomes the steering committee, helping to set the policies, providing the direction and training. I liken it to a rowing race. The reliability engineer is the coxswain (on a rowing team, the coxswain is the member who sits in the stern facing the bow, steers the boat, and coordinates the power and rhythm of the rowers) and the designers are the rowers. When the two work together well, the boat seems to glide across the water smoothly and effortlessly.
2.1 Who Should Take a DFR Course?
Every time I teach a DFR course, my clients always ask me who should attend. Well, the designers of course. Should marketing attend? Sure they should. You should have representation from sales, customer service, and manufacturing as well. Of course, the reliability team should also attend. Anyone who has a stake in the reliability of the product should attend. But the designers are a key to the process. Each day-to-day decision they make about the design of the product will ultimately affect the reliability of the product. What is the role of the reliability group? That group should be the leaders and the educators; the ones that help create the goals and write the RPP. But the day-to-day activities should be performed by the designers (being guided by the reliability team).
CASE STUDY: Getting Your Designers to Buy Into DFR?
A telecommunications company was suffering from low product reliability. Each time they discovered a problem either in product testing or in manufacturing, the test engineers and manufacturing engineers couldn’t get the designers to help fix the problem because the designers were too busy designing the next product. You see, they were being incentivized for how fast they could bring the product to market, not for how reliable the product was. Then the company did a smart thing - the CEO made a change and told the designers that they are now responsible for helping fix field failures. You know what happened? All of a sudden, the designers started listening to the reliability team and a DFR program was born inside their company. Most designers love to work on new product designs and most dislike having to redesign something that didn’t work quite right. The sooner they can get onto the next project, the better from their perspective. Therefore, tying their next project to the successful reliable completion of the previous project is a good incentive for them to ensure they design a reliable product.
CHAPTER 3: RELIABILITY INTEGRATION PROVIDES INTEGRITY
Reliability Integration is the process of seamlessly, cohesively integrating reliability techniques together to maximize reliability and at the lowest possible cost. What this means is you should think of your reliability program as a set of techniques that are used together rather than just a bunch of individual activities.
You are building a system, and a system is made up of different components and assemblies and there are different disciplines involved (some of the main disciplines are electrical, mechanical, software, firmware, optical, and chemical). All of the individual pieces make up the system, so don’t forget about the interactions and make sure that you think of the reliability from a system perspective. In the figure below, we illustrate this point using the disciplines of electrical, mechanical, and software.
This is especially true of software versus hardware disciplines. Most companies work on Software Reliability and Hardware Reliability separately and don’t integrate the two. When failures occur, this then results in finger-pointing rather than synergy.
This is equally true of electrical versus mechanical disciplines. We see more synergy between these two groups during programs than between software and hardware; however, at the beginning, they rarely get together to discuss common reliability goals and how to apportion them down to each major area of the system.
Product development teams view reliability within each of the separate sub-domains of mechanical, electrical, and software issues. Your customers view reliability as a system-level issue, with minimal concern placed on the distinction between mechanical, electrical, and software issues. Your customer wants the whole product and all its parts to work together perfectly. Since the primary measure of reliability is made by your customer and their end users, engineering teams should maintain a balance of both views (system and sub-domain) in order to develop a reliable product.
3.1 Reliability versus Cost
Intuitively, the emphasis in reliability to achieve a reduction in warranty and in-service costs results in some minimal increase in development and manufacturing costs. Use of the proper techniques during the proper life cycle phase will help to minimize total life cycle cost (LCC).
To minimize total LCC, your organization should do two things:
1) Choose the best techniques from all of the techniques available and apply these techniques at the proper phases of the product life cycle.
2) Properly integrate these techniques by feeding information between different phases of the product life cycle.
 In this figure, it is evident that:
1) Program costs go up as you spend more on reliability. At a certain point, you won’t get your return on investment (ROI) because the reliability has reached a point where it is becoming increasingly more difficult to improve the reliability. That is why it is important to know what the goal is, and it can be just as detrimental to your company to produce a product that is too reliable as not reliable enough. The product that is too reliable usually comes with increased costs, and your customers may not need this level of reliability and will opt for the less expensive product. When was the last time you purchased a $200 blender or toaster?
2) Warranty costs go up as reliability goes down.
3) Software has no associated manufacturing costs (other than perhaps the cost of CD’s and manuals and the cost of personnel to test the product in production), so warranty costs and savings are almost entirely allocated to hardware. If there is no cost savings associated with improving Software Reliability, why not leave it as is and focus on improving hardware reliability to save money? You shouldn’t do this for two reasons:
a) Our experience is that for typical systems, software failures outnumber hardware failures by a ratio of 10:1 (see Section 31.1 for more details).
Customers buy integrated systems, not just hardware.
b) The benefits for a Software Reliability program aren’t in direct cost savings. Instead, the benefits are in:
i) Increased software/firmware staff availability with reduced operational schedules resulting in fewer corrective maintenance events.
ii) Increased customer goodwill based on improved customer satisfaction.
CASE STUDY: Linking Electrical, Mechanical, and Software Reliability together
We were working with a semiconductor equipment company to help improve their reliability on their next generation product. First, we provided a Design for Reliability (DFR) seminar for each of the three different disciplines – the electrical group, the mechanical group, and the software group. Then we met with the electrical, mechanical, and software team leads and developed reliability goals. First we started with high level system goals and the apportioned the goals down to each subsystem – electrical, mechanical, and software. Each group lead then took the goal for his subsystem and broke it down further within his area. Then we worked with each group lead to put together a reliability program plan to meet his subsystem goals. We rolled each of these different subsystem plans into an overall reliability plan for the product. Then we worked with each group lead to ensure he was on track for meeting his subsystem goals throughout the product development process. The end result was that our client was able to achieve their reliability goals for each subsystem and for the system as a whole.
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TAKE A SELF ASSESSMENT
This month instead of solving a problem, we are asking our readers to take a Self Assessment.
Clients ask us all the time on how to evaluate their reliability program. The best method is a Reliability Assessment. We created this quick Self-Assessment tool you can use to get a baseline of your reliability program. If you take this self assessment and email us your scores, we will offer a copy of my new book.
High Technology OEM’s face significant increases in global competition, time to market pressures, and technological complexities, which result in higher risks for bringing new products to market. These risks drive the need for greater use of outsourced services.
To reduce these risks, the PRG has developed a “one-stop-shop” of outsourced services that helps companies to bring new products to market. Engagements are tailored to business and product profiles, and partners work together to deliver services that range from initial concept through global logistics and repair.
Your Benefits
- Our integrated solutions will save you time, streamlining bringing your product to market.
- Our proven partnerships will eliminate guesswork and prevent breakdowns in communication.
- Our partners will educate you on current best practices.
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Toyo Japan offers HALT and HASS services at their Tokyo office. Check out their HALT vibration video at http://www.toyo.co.jp/halt. Ops partners with Toyo to provide HALT and Reliability Services for all of their customers in Japan.
Contact Masashi Kawakami at kawakami@toyo.co.jp.
Given the current economic climate, we know of many talented individuals that are currently looking for work. Therefore, if you are an employer and have a need for any position within reliability, engineering, or operations, we are offering to advertise in our newsletter at no cost. Just doing our part to help stimulate the economy! Below are a few positions that we do know about.
 Senior Reliability Consultant
Ops A La Carte is looking for Senior Reliability Consultants around the world to join our team of consultants and work on some of the most exciting and challenging projects in the industry. Whether you have an existing consulting practice or are interested in developing one, please contact us.
 Three Reliability Engineering Positions
Position is for their Bend, Oregon office. Email Mike Fife at: mikefife@pvpowered.com.
 Reliability Engineer
Ops A La Carte's newsletter goes out to over 18,000 subscribers. If you would like to put an ad or job opening in next quarter's "Reliability News", fill out our Job Openings Form or call at (408) 654-0499.
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