WHAT IS OPS A LA CARTE?
Ops A La Carte is a Professional Consulting Firm focused on Reliability Engineering Services, Reliability Management, and Reliability Education to assist you in developing and executing any and all elements of Reliability throughout your Organization and your Product’s Life Cycle. 

We also provide an array of Reliability Seminars and Courses.

NEW! Download Brochure: Ops A La Carte Company Brochure (pdf)

Ops A La Carte is located in Saratoga , California in the middle of Silicon Valley.  Our client list stretches around the world.

Our test lab HALT and HASS Labs is located in Santa Clara, California. We also have four international offices - Singapore, New Delhi, India, United Kingdom and now our latest addition, China. Please click on the attached links to find out more about each office.

Ops A La Carte is a private California LLC and is a 100% owner-operated business.  Founded in 2000 the company's sales broke the $1,000,000 milestone in its first 4 years, with growth rates of 100-400% per year and is continuing at this growth rate.  Our customer base is over 300 companies.  The company has been profitable through every quarter since our inception.  All growth has been funded solely through the profits of the business.

Ops A La Carte has established worldwide recognition as a result of our team’s long-term presence in the Reliability field, extensive lecturing locally and worldwide, regular publication of technical papers, and active participation on reliability committees including RAMS, IEEE, ASQ, ARS, and AST.  Ops A La Carte is made up of a group of highly accomplished Reliability Consultants.

As a result of serving clients in many individual phases of Reliability, Ops A La Carte has developed a complete menu of Reliability Engineering Services.  These services cover the complete range of your product's life cycle.

Ops A La Carte has a distinctive worldwide reputation for the process of Reliability Integration^SM, the process of using multiple reliability elements in conjunction to greatly increase the power and value of any Reliability Program.

Here are the top 10 reasons why you should work with us:

1) We have the unique ability to go into a company and assess your reliability capabilities, match those capabilities against your goals, and then write a fully integrated Reliability Program Plan along with recommending a course of action for implementing new methods.  We can do this at the Organizational Level as well as at the Product Level.  We have a team of Senior-Level Reliability Consultants who are very capable with any and all aspects of the implementation process.  Our team can quickly provide expertise, execution, and education.

2) We use Reliability Integration^SM to seamlessly and cohesively integrate Reliability Tools and Techniques together to maximize reliability at the lowest possible cost.  For example, we take the thermal sensitivity information we collect from a Reliability Prediction Analysis and feed it into the planning stage of a Highly Accelerated Life Test (HALT) to determine where to place thermocouples and to assure the proper monitoring is in place to detect issues in these high thermal rise areas.

3) We are unique in our approach to Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT) in that we have the expertise to use the proper stress types and levels for your product and its environment rather than only applying temperature and vibration to every product. We often use voltage margining, humidity, power cycling, and more. By doing this, we are able to maximize the acceleration of the test while keeping the data relevant to end-use conditions. This allows us to improve the reliability of the product as much as possible in the shortest amount of time.

4) We are innovative in our approach to Accelerated Life Testing. We have recently filed for patent on a new and improved method for Accelerated Life Testing called Leading Indicators in which we have figured a way to detect indicators of failure before the failure occurs, thereby allowing us to extrapolate and predict failures and thus shortening the overall test time. This has proven to work for many different types of mechanical and electromechanical devices. I’ve attached a presentation we gave on this subject at a conference in Washington DC last November.

5) We help customers through the RoHS process and assure that you maintain a high level of reliability as you transition to Lead Free Solder. We do this through education, analysis, and testing. We are experts in the area of developing test plans tailored to qualify new lead-free designs.

6) We provide Software Reliability expertise, both in helping companies streamline their software development process to make it more error free as well as helping companies measure the reliability and quality of their software to determine the optimal time to ship a product.

7) We help customers understand their warranty better, providing warranty event cost models and supporting methodologies that help teams identify warranty cost reduction solutions which integrate both component fail rate reduction strategies and strategies that shift the support process mix to less expensive processes. The warranty cost model constructs the cost of warranty events from both event frequencies and the specific support process costs used to resolve each event.

8) We have consulted in over 40 different industries including but not limited to: Aerospace, Automotive, Computers, Defense, Energy (Fuel Cell, Oil, Solar), Medical, Telecom, Wireless, Video, and many more. See our page About Clients for more details.

9) We are truly a national and international organization. We have clients in over 30 states in the US and 10 different countries, and we have 3 international offices.

10) We offer services both at the system level as well as at the chip level and everything in between. At the system level, we work on products as large as 100 foot rotary drills or Semiconductor Process equipment with hundreds of individual assemblies. And at the chip level, we help companies with their ASIC designs and chip level test strategies.

WE ARE
Integrating Reliability throughout a Product’s Life Cycle
Well known / established
Well lectured
On committees (IEEE AST, IEEE Reliability Society, RAMS, ASQ CRE)
Pioneers of HALT and HASS
Rapidly expanding in other areas
Client need-driven
Customer commitment driven
Growing as a result of continued customer satisfaction
Developing our service menu as a result of direct client requests
Very scalable
Well connected with partners - able to quickly assemble teams

WE ARE NOT
just project managers
hands-off
job shop

What’s in a Name? 
The name "Ops A La Carte" was chosen because our original charter was to offer any type of Technical Operations consulting on an "a la carte" basis. Technical Operations comprises all the functions needed to turn the first prototype into a shipable product. This is an area that the Design Engineers never seem to have time to do, and the Manufacturing Department usually does not know how to do.   We find that the services demanded the most within Technical Operations are our Reliability and Quality Consulting Services because they tend to be the ones overlooked the most within the design process. However, we are continuing to grow the rest of our technical operations' consulting services to keep up with customer demand.

We continue to offer all of our services "a la carte".  However, many customers prefer for us to recommend which services are appropriate for their situation, and our Reliability Program Assessment service is perfectly geared to do this.

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