News
News Releases

February 20, 2013 Ops' launches its new Reliapedia website, the most complete library of reliability information. And as part of our partnership with ASQ Reliability Division, you can also find it linked from ASQ's Reliability Division site at asq.org/reliability

February 13, 2013 Ops' Managing Partner Mike SIlverman just completed his 32 day 9 city 4 country tour around North America and Europe. Mike visited the following areas, giving presentations and visit clients in each.

Jan 13-15 Chicago
Jan 16-19 London
Jan 20-23 Germany
Jan 24-26-Prague - HALT open seminar
Jan 27-31 Orlando - RAMS Seminar
Feb 1 Miami
Feb 2-9 Denver - ASQ Quality Conference
Feb 10-11 San Diego - ASQ Quality Society of San Diego
Feb 12-13 Anaheim - MD&M seminar

Feb 12, 2013, MD&M West - Anaheim, CA

OPS' Mike Silverman gave a one day seminar called "Medical Device Reliability Testing".

Feb 7th, 2013,ASQ Quality Conference, Denver, CO

About Event: We exhibited and presented a paper on Return on Investment for a Design for Reliability Program.

Congratulations to the following winners:

Liz Burnett (below left) from Hotfoot Corp for winning closest to the pin in our putting content, knocking a 30 foot putt 1/2" from the pin.
Patrick Willey (below center) of Level3 for winning Mike's book on reliability in our raffle drawing
Mike Patten (below right) of Otterbox for winning a free seminar in our Reliability Sympoium in our raffle drawing

January 28-31, 2013 Reliability, Maintainability, and Availability Symposium (RAMS), Orlando, FL

About Event: We exhibited and presented the follow 5 papers and tutorials at this event.

"Tutorial - Introduction to R & M Management", by Fred Schenkelberg
"Tutorial - Effective Reliability Program Traits and Management, by Fred Schenkelberg
"Accelerated Testing for 2-year Storage" by Fred Schenkelberg
"Return on Investment for a Design for Reliability Program Abstract", by Mike Silverman and Fred Schenkelberg
"FMEA on FMEA", by Mike Silverman and Fred Schenkelberg

Congratulations to the following winners:

Sneha Shah (below left) of Portable Power for winning closest to the pin in our putting contest, knocking a 25 foot putt 2" from the pin
Todor Ganev (below right) for winning a bottle of wine in our raffle drawing

January 24, 2013 Best of Accelerated Reliability Testing, Prague, Czech Republic

About Event: Pavel Urban, Ops' consultant from the Czech Republic and Mike Silverman, Managing Partner of Ops A La Carte gave a 1 day seminar on the best accelerated reliability testing techniques to an audience made up of German and Czech companies.

December 6, 2012 BIOMEDevice Show, San Jose, CA

About Event: We presented our seminar on Medical Reliability Testing jointly with Walt Maclay, President of Voler Systems

Congratulations to Ravi Pawar (below center) of Acnovate for winning a copy of MIke's Reliability book in our raffle.

Nov 21, 2012 - New Consultant Jon Elerath Joins Ops

Dr. Elerath received his BSME and MS Reliability from the University of Arizona, and received the PhD from the University of Maryland. He has over 35 years of experience in Reliability covering industries as diverse as nuclear power safety systems, electro-mechanical robotics in the plasma-etch industry, fault tolerant computers, hard disk drives in the data storage systems, and mechanical reliability for rotating equipment in high concentration photovoltaic solar tracking systems. Dr. Elerath’s areas of expertise include HDD reliability, complex system modeling with non-constant hazard rates, field data analysis for mixed time-to-failure distributions, prognostics/mechanical reliability through vibration monitoring, and reliability testing (RDT/ORT/Burn-in). He uses his extensive education and experience to formulate strong statistical bases for all his plans and analyses. Dr. Elerath has been an active participant in the creation of IEEE standards on reliability prediction (IEEE 1413 and IEEE 1413.1). He is the secretary for the Santa Clara Valley Reliability Society of the IEEE, has written over 30 papers and technical reports on the topic of reliability, and has been session moderator at the RAMS symposiums.

Nov 14, 2012 - Meet the Experts, Santa Clara, CA, 10:30am-1pm, FREE.

Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman gave a talk on Medical Reliability Testing - SMPTech

Congratulations to Wendy Desmonde for winning a copy of Mike's book "50 Ways to Improve Product Reliability"

Nov 7, 2012 - OPS' FREE WEBINAR on 40 Years of HALT

About 40 years ago, some of the first papers on Strife and Tri-Axial Vibration Screening started being published.  A few years later, Gregg Hobbs coined the terms HALT and HASS.  By the early 90’s there were two different companies making equipment that could perform HALT.  By the late 90’s, there were many more.

Over the past 40 years, there have been many advances in the methodologies of HALT, but many of the techniques have remained the same.  This free webinar will review the history of HALT:  Where we started, where we are, and where we are going with the technology.

Some of the areas we covered in this tutorial were:
1)       History of HALT and HASS
2)       Basics of HALT and HASS
3)       Links between HALT and Design for Reliability
4)       Links between HALT and Design for Robustness
5)       New advances in equipment
6)       New advances in HALT methodology
7)       New advances in HASS Development methodology
8)       What % of companies are doing HALT
9)       What % of companies are doing HASS
10)   What lies in the future for HALT

All of these were explained and demonstrated in this 1 hour webinar

This comes on the heels of our successful 17th annual Accelerated Stress Testing and Reliability (ASTR) Workshop in Toronto last week.  We have decided to hold the 18th annual ASTR conference for Oct 9-11 in San Diego.  Save the date and start thinking about presentations.

40 Years of HALT - Slides
40 Years of HALT - Webcast

Nov 1, 2012 - Minnesota Reliability Consortium, Minneapolis, MN

Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman gave a talk on "Calculating ROI when Implementing a DFR Program".

Nov 1, 2012 - Medical Design and Manufacturing (MD&M) Minneapolis, Minneapolis, MN

We gave a seminar called "Medical Device Reliability Testing".

Oct 19, 2012 - Mike Silverman named Chair of the 2013 ASTR Workshop

The 2013 Accelerated Stress Testing and Reliability (ASTR) workshop will be held on Oct 9-11, 2013 in San Diego. The theme for the workshop is "Accelerating Reliability into the 21st Century"

Sept 17-19, 2012 - IEEE Accelerated Stress Testing (ASTR) Workshop,Toronto, Canada

This workshop is focused on accelerated stress testing. Ops A La Carte presented 5 separate presentations on accelerated testing, including Mike Silverman giving a keynote speech on the history of HALT and where the industry is heading.

Also, congratulations to Reza Azarkhail from Lam for winning our drawing at our booth at the show.

Oct 3, 2012 - OPS' FREE WEBINAR on Advances in HALT Calculator - New MTBF and ROI Calculator,

Since we introduced our HALT Calculator 3 years ago, we have made some important improvements
1) Calculator now resides on the cloud
2) We have developed methods for using calculator as input to HALT plan
3) We have added an ROI Calculator
4) We have added an MTBF estimator
5) We have added several new factors, including duty cycle and variable confidence intervals

All of these were explained and demonstrated in this 1 hour webinar

HALTCalculator-New - Slides
HALTCalculator-New - Webcast

Sept 12, 2012 - ASQ Statistics Meeting on Lean 6 Sigma and Design for Reliability

Dr. Shree Nanganuri and Ops A La Carte's JIm Johnson gave a presentation on LSS and DFR – similarities as well as unique differences between the two approaches.

Sept 7, 2012 - Ops Visited Many Cities in Fall 2012. Ops A La Carte's Managing Partner Mike Silverman traveled around the US this fall visiting with clients and giving presentations at conferences. He visited the following areas:

Sept 10 - Phoenix, AZ
Sept 11 - San Diego, CA
Sept 12-14 - Honolulu, HI
Sept 18-19 - Herndon, VA
Sept 20 - Milwaulkee, WI
Oct 1-3 - Denver, CO
Oct 10-12 - Boston, MA
Oct 15-25 - Toronto, Montreal, and Nova Scotia
Nov 1-2 - Minneapolis, MN
Nov 8-9 - Boston, MA

 Sept 6, 2012 - IEEE Reliability Meeting - Discussion on Design for Reliability, Cupertino, CA
 Ops A La Carte’s Mike Silverman gave an overview of OPS' new ROI calculator when developing a Design for Reliability program.

For more info, please

 Sept 5, 2012 - OPS gave a FREE Webinar on Return on Investment (ROI) for a Design for a Reliability (DFR) Program

Are you stagnant with your product reliability program because you can't get funding to make improvements? If so, this is an important webinar for you. We will teach you how to measure the return on investment when implementing your new reliability program. There are a number of factors involved in calculating the ROI for your DFR program, including:
1) Improved Warranty Rate (derived from your Reliability Maturity Level which we will show you how to calculate)
2) Current Warranty Rate
3) Cost per Repair
4) Cost of New Reliability Program
5) Savings from Losing a Customer
6) Volume

In this presentation, we showed you how to calculate each of these to derive your DFR ROI

Below are links to both the slides and the webcast

Calculating ROI When Implementing a DFR Program - Slides
Calculating ROI When Implementing a DFR Program - Webinar

Sept 1, 2012 - Ops A La Carte Becomes Counterfeit Avoidance Leader. Ops A La Carte is proud to annouce we joined the organization ECC and have taken the role of Chair of the Laboratory Industry Advisory Group. Click here for the latest press release.

August 31, 2012 - Ops Upgrades our HALT Calculator. Ops A La Carte's patent-pending HALT Calculator just got a major upgrade. We have added the following new features:

ROI Calculation
MTBF Prediction Calculator (to quickly estimate your inherent MTBF)
Variable Duty Cycle
Variable Confidence Factor
Many more data points in several more industries
Better Industry Descriptors

To try it out, go to iHALT Calculator. Need a free demo pass?

August 23, 2012 - Presentation at TAN. Jim Johnson of Ops A La Carte delivers a presentation at The African Network (TAN) called "Creating Strategic and Tactical Solutions for African Businesses with the aim of meeting organization goals"

"Ops hopes to become a global leader in supporting the reliability of products coming out of the Cottage Industries of Africa (CIOA) which is an idea recently being discussed by Stephen Ozoigbo, the new CEO who himself is not new to international business and found his calling in supporting this mission", says Johnson.

August 1, 2012 - Three New Consultants. We are growing rapidly in our project base, and to accommodate for this, we have brought on three new consultants in the last quarter.

Les Warrington Senior Reliability/Quality Consultant, Course Instructor

Les Warrington is a reliability engineering and management consultant with Ops a la Carte, with focus on effective integration of reliability capability into company culture, to maximize business opportunity and success. Previously, he was Director of Reliability Engineering at Research in Motion, where he delivered assurance of product reliability goals in greater than 20 major product developments. He highlighted the direct links between field failures and lost corporate profits and, having gained executive oversight of reliability as a core requirement, integrated all departments in the effective and timely delivery of product reliability. Earlier, Les pioneered a widely emulated post-graduate degree program in quality and reliability at the University of Warwick, UK, emphasizing management, practical application for industry and an ethos of continuous improvement, and delivered Warwick reliability-centric teaching world-wide. He led major research projects, provided consulting services widely in the automotive, aerospace and other technology sectors, and was a leader in the UK National Reliability Strategy. Les earned a Bachelor of Science (Honours) at the University of Southampton in Aeronautics and Astronautics, and completed post-graduate technology and management training at the Royal Air Force College, Cranwell, UK. He is a Chartered Engineer (UK). He is an active member of IEC TC56, developing standards in dependability. He is also a member of the IEEE Reliability Society, and has retained professional membership of the Royal Aeronautical Society (UK).

Dave Kinghorn, M.S., MBA Senior Reliability Consultant/Program Manager

Dave has 30 years experience in product design, process development, manufacturing statistics, reliability program management, test, and operations management. A veteran of 6 startups in the electronics, photonics, and energy businesses, Dave's focus is on the economics and incorporation of quality & reliability into all phases of the product life cycle. In addition to startups, Dave has held Senior & Principal Engineering and Operations positions at such companies as National Semiconductor, Read-Rite, and Kulicke & Soffa Industries. Dave is an active consulting engineer with clients in the Integrated Photonics business, electronics manufacturing & advanced semiconductor test solutions, and heavy industries such as electroplating and Stainless Steel processing. Most recently, Dave was Director of Reliability at Energy Innovations, a commercial scale solar energy system manufacturer employing the latest state-of-the-art Solar Concentrator technology. Dave holds a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Missouri, and both an M.S. in Chemical Engineering and an M.B.A. from San Jose State University. Dave is also the author of 3 U.S Patents.

Mike Doty Senior Mechanical Reliability/Design Consultant

Mike has over 25 years of experience in mechanical engineering and design, including manufacturing, design, analysis, testing, and systems integration. He has designed machinery, small mechanisms, space craft structures, printed circuit boards, wiring harnesses, and electronic packaging. Mike has also performed stress, thermal, shock, and vibration testing, statistical and worst case tolerance analysis, and materials selection for reliability in extreme environments. He has hands-on CAD and machine shop experience fabricating prototypes, along with the use of rapid prototyping (3D printer) equipment and technologies. His information technology experience includes system repair, data recovery, networking, and web development. Mike has a BS Degree in Engineering and Applied Science from the California Institute of Technology. He has worked in the automotive, petrochemical, nuclear, aerospace, medical instruments, and consumer products industries. He has consulted at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Hughes Space and Communications, EG&G Rocky Flats, Schlage Lock, Ethicon, DuPont, Bechtel, United Engineers and Constructors, Motorola, Ford, FMC, and numerous small business clients.

July 3, 2012 - Celestica Parntership. Ops A La Carte creates strategic alliance with Celestica and provides seminar to Celestica's clients in Toronto.

Celestica's Engineering Services team was pleased to host Mike Silverman, founder and managing partner at Ops a la Carte, at the Celestica Toronto facility on June 19, 2012. The Celestica team and Mike delivered a webinar and participated in a face-to-face session that highlighted approaches and tools for improving product reliability. This joint webinar was a key step in helping to strengthen the on-going relationship between Celestica Engineering Services and Ops A La Carte.

--- Nicki Lakhani, Global Branding, Celestica

June 15-17, 2012 - Ops Delivers Paper at ARS and Scores High Marks - Ops A La Carte presents on Return on Investiment (ROI) using a Design for Reliability (DFR) Program. Below are pictures from the event. Congratulations to Fernando Amaton of Halliburton, Shawn McKay of Rand, and Michael LaCourt of Ortho Clinical Diagnostics for winning a copy of Mike Silverman's book 50 Ways to Improve Product Reliability. Congratulations to Robert Belinski of GE Medical for getting closest to the pin at 2".

June 6, 2012 - Ounce of Prevention Strategy (OPS). Ops A La Carte is proud to annouce their new methdology called Ounce of Preventation Strategy (OPS). We kicked this off with a webinar. See details beow.

OPS Webinar Slides
OPS Webinar Video

May 25, 2012 - Three New Consultants. We are growing rapidly in our project base, and to accommodate for this, we have brought on three new consultants in the last quarter.

Jim Nallan Senior Quality/Reliability Consultant

Jim has over 22 years of experience in quality and reliability. He has In-depth experience in Total Quality Management, Program Management, global contract manufacturing and supply chain to continually enhance quality, reliability, profitability, and productivity by ensuring incoming, in process, and outgoing material/products efficiently meet business objectives and customer satisfaction. Led, fostered, and motivated teamwork cohesion to sustain design improvement and process efficiency with cost reduction, high yield, and low return rates at highest Quality Level. Teamwork cohesion for continual enhancement in design improvement, detail oriented quality, reliability, profitability, productivity, vendor approval, and supply chain management Proficient in the use of FMEA, CAPA, FDA, Six-Sigma, SIPOC, GR&R, RoHS, Safety, EMI/EMC; implementation and certification of TQM/ISO9001: 2000/TL9000; ISO14000.

Yoram Rubin, MS, MBA Senior Reliability and RF Design Consultant

Yoram has 30 years of experience in reliability and RF design. Results-oriented leader with senior management experience in the Product and Test Engineering discipline within Operations. Demonstrated engineering, manufacturing and program management know how with proven track record of transferring and releasing new products from engineering to production and simultaneously increasing efficiency and yield of released products. Establish new products manufacturing process flow and introduce test infrastructure by second prototypes phase date to support engineering bring up. Able to quickly assess technical and yield challenges on complex products and develop a plan to resolve them while meeting committed customer ship dates. Experience in low volume/high mix system production testing as well as in high volume/low cost consumer products. Entrepreneurial management style, strong work ethic with positive can-do attitude. He has a BS and MS from USC and an MBA from Pepperdine.

Frank Sykes Senior Reliability Consultant

Frank has over 30 years of experience in Reliability, Maintainability, and System Safety Program Plans and Prediction Analysis in Defense and Commercial Programs. In the early stages of his career he became a Process Trainer for TQMS implementation at McDonnell Douglas Aircraft, Long Beach, CA, where he performed Stand up- training on Continuous Improvement Process involving, Standard Work techniques, Just- in-Time Manufacturing Techniques, Kan- Ban and Taguchi methodologies, as well a Statistical Process Control. Frank has extensive experience on the preparation and delivery of R & M Program Plans, System Safety and Fault Hazard Analysis, FMECA and Fault Tree development and analysis. In the last 10 years as an Independent Contractor, Frank has performed and delivered Hundred of DoD required documents for the Client in a short Turn-Around-Time.

MD&M East - May 22-24, 2012, Philadelphia, PA

Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman givie a 3 hour class on "Medical Reliability Testing - Identifying Testing Requirements Early." Last year, Mike gave a similar talk at MD&M New York, MD&M Chicago, MD&M Minneapolis, and MD&M Anaheim.

SMTA Conference on Soldering and Reliability - May 15-18, 2012, Toronto

Ops A La Carte's Peter Arrowsmith gave a presentation at this conference on "Improving Product Reliability Using Accelerated Stress Testing". The paper was co-authorized by our client Bojan Randjelovic at AB Sciex.

Improving Product Reliability Using Accelerated Testing - Presentation

LUNCH SEMINAR / FREE WEBINAR on Managing Design Risks, May 17, 2012, San Jose

Overview:
Successful new product development (NPD) involves the art of balancing schedules, resources, and costs to enable products that launch on-time, with desired performance and at the right cost. Inevitably, trade-offs and risks must be made along the way. Companies that manage these trade-offs and risks consistently outperform their competitors.

This panel of industry experts looks at how to identify all the risks in development, and shares their knowledge of the latest emerging risks. The panelists offer a variety of perspectives –ranging from Mechanical and Electrical Design, Product Reliability and Parts Fabrication. Practical issues of how upstream design decisions impact downstream performance, quality and costs will be explored.

This is part of the quarterly Product Realization Group Lunch Seminars

In addition, the PRG recently released a white paper on NPI Seven Best Practices.

FREE WEBINAR on Design for Robustness, Wed, April 4, 2012

This is part of our monthly FREE Webinar series

Robust Design (RD) Methodology is discussed for hardware development. Comparison is made with reliability engineering (RE) tools and practices. Differences and similarities are presented. Proximity to ideal function for robust design is presented and compared to physics of failure and other reliability modeling and prediction approaches. Measurement selection is shown to strongly differentiates RD and reliability engineering methods. When and how to get the most from each methodology is outlined. Pitfalls for each set of practices are also covered.

Design for Robustness - Presentation

International Reliability Innovations Symposium (IRIS) - March 16, 2012, San Jose, CA and via WEBINAR

The IEEE Reliability Society of Silicon Valley is sponsoring a conference specifically devoted to innovation.

For more info, please

FREE WEBINAR on Tribology and Reliability, March 7, 2012

This is part of our monthly FREE Webinar series

Tribology is the science and engineering of interacting surfaces in relative motion.  In this seminar, we introduced the basics of Tribology, their impact on reliability and do so from the perspective of machine applications. Lubrication, film thickness, loads and Hertzian contact types effect the reliability of a design.  Weibull is frequently used to model wear characteristics, but is this always the best distribution for characterizing the reliability of machine elements?  All of these areas were explored.

Tribology and Reliability - Presentation

March 1, 2012 - HALT Calculator on the Cloud. We are pleased to announce that our HALT Calculator is now available as a cloud-based application so you can access it direclty whenever you need. We have a payment system in place on-line for quicker access. With the cloud application, we will also offering either pay by use (you can order as many use credits as you'd like) or yearly subscriptions. The yearly subscriptions work great when you have your own chamber or when you perform many HALTs a year and you would like to run the calculator during HALT planning to set must meet criteria, or when you are in the middle of the test and trying to determine which failures to fix and continue testing. For first time users ask us for a free coupon to try out the calculator and see for yourself how useful of a tool it is. Also, if you have HALT and Field Data, please contact us. If we can use your data in our model, we will give you FREE access to the calculator.

March 1, 2012, Mandarin Translation of "50 Ways" Reliability Book , Managing Partner Mike Silverman's book "How Reliable Is Your Product: 50 Ways to Improve Product Reliability" is now available in Mandarin in ebook for only $9.95 on Amazon and through our publisher Superstar Press. Follow links for copies. You can view the 1st 3 Chapters at 50 Ways to Improve Reliability - in Mandarin, or 提高产品可靠性的50种方法.

February 28, 2012 - OPS Hires Director of Client Performance. We are proud to annouce that we have brought on a new Director of Client Performance. Jim's role will be to develop and deliver complete solutions for clients.

Jim Johnson Director, Client Performance, Reliability and Quality Assurance

Jim has been directing corporate plans in performance, quality, reliability and prevention since 1978 with exemplary service record to clients before the term service became a clichés. He has held Director level positions in component engineering, quality assurance and product launch and is an acknowledged expert and innovator in continuous improvement techniques for corrective and preventive action leading product launch for wireless and telecommunications products, removable hard disk drives, lap top disk drive spindles, electric car components, biometric readers (optoelectronics/photonics), photo voltaic and radio interferometry (micro array antennas for cell phones) where he was awarded “innovator status” by UK Government introducing micro array technology to Scotland.

February 20, 2012 - Four New Consultants. We are growing rapidly in our project base, and to accommodate for this, we have brought on four new consultants in the last quarter.

Mark Caruso Senior Reliability Consultant

Mark brings 28 years experience with technology leaders Cisco Systems, Teradyne, Radius, and SunPower. He managed the Accelerated Life Test lab at SunPower systems R&D, evaluating new products using a Physics-of-Failure model. Mark earned a degree in Electrical Engineering from Caltech and started his career with Megatest and Teradyne, designing high-speed test equipment for ASICs and ICs. He possesses thorough and practical knowledge of the ISO-9000 STD for quality systems, including part 3 (Software) for which he taught a course at UCSC extension. Within Cisco, Mark designed customized stations for physical-layer testing of electrical and optical telecom products up to10Gb/s. In developing test plans for design validation and manufacturing production –he has worked extensively with offshore CMs in Asia and Europe, employing a wide variety of quality systems (DMAIC, TQM, 8D, etc) and utilizing statistical methods to monitor and improve quality and reliability. His skills include validation testing, failure analysis, DFMEA, certification testing and test automation. Willing to lead or facilitate change, Mark is an experienced presenter and facilitator who enjoys working with start-ups and growing companies on new products.

James Romero Senior Reliability Consultant

James has over 20 years of experience in consumer product development and high volume manufacturing. Product experience includes; Smart phones, Tablets, PC Computers, Notebooks, Digital Camera, Webcam, Network LAN Security, RAID/Server, and ODD/HDD products. James has expertise in product research, planning, testing and reporting. At Palm, James was the Sr. Reliability Engineering Manager and transformed the Reliability Engineering function. He developed new reliability test processes and research for current product line and emerging technology. Worked closely with Cross Functional managers to promote new initiatives and ensure necessary buy-in. Redefined staff testing objectives and measurable criteria for early proto stage analysis. Created new process and documentation called “Reliability Design Analysis” for the purposes of critical design analysis of key control factors. Implemented Robust Design of Experiments concept to analyze functions in the Smart Phone line.Worked with sustaining organization on analysis of field issues and corrective actions. At Logitech, he was the Sr. Engineering Manager, for Video Hardware new product development and test engineering. He worked with project teams to investigate and develop products. Design, Test, and Validate hardware designs meet marketing requirements. Activities included image sensor and ASIC interface qualification. Test Development department defines automated hardware and software requirements necessary to develop and deploy products into production.

Jay Pisharodi, MSEE, MBA Senior Reliability Consultant

Jay has over 20 years of experience in the electronics industry, and has extensive experience with various stages in the product life cycle. He has developed mechanical test fixtures, procedures and programs as part of NPI test development for a several different products. His experience includes project management, product design, testing, quality improvement and reliability of communication products, power modules, memory and other products. He has managed environmental testing, mechanical reliability and compliance testing of electronic products. His areas of expertise include NPI, DFM, FMEA, MTBF prediction, failure analysis and the development of effective debug strategies.

Shawn Glanton Senior Reliability Technician

Shawn is a Senior Reliability Technician with over 15 years ofexperience that specializes in planning, scheduling, setting up, and executing all types of reliability tests including traditional environmental tests, Design Verification Tests (DVTs), and all forms of accelerated tests such as HALT, HASS, and Demonstration Tests (RDTs). He has also performed Software Integration Testing, Inventory management, and Field Service support.

 February 16, 2012,  MD&M West - Anaheim

We gave a seminar called "Medical Device Reliability Testing".  We will be doing this seminar again at MD&M East in May, 2012.

February 7, 2012, Improving Product Life Cycle Costs in Today’s Global Manufacturing Environment - Santa Clara, CA

About Event: We had 4 presenters for this event. The presenters and their topics are shown below. You can download each presentation in the links below.

Ops A La Carte: "Using Design for Reliability (DfR) to reduce Product Life Cycle Costs", by Mike Silverman, Ops A La Carte
Agilent: "The economics of diagnostics and repair in development, production, and support", by Duane Lowenstein, Agilent
Camstar: "Holistic view of quality", by Nader Fathi, Camstar
Harmonic: "The Necessity of Real-Time Product Quality Visibility in an outsourced High Mix/Low Volume Manufacturing Operation", by Jason Ruppert, VP Operations

February 1st, Design of Experiments (DOE) and its Many Uses within Reliability, FREE WEBINAR, by Lou LaVallee of Ops A La Carte Experimental design activities were discussed including orthogonal matrix selection (with modification), factor selection, factor assignment, measurement system selection, objective(s) definition, and the process of planning and implementing experiments. Special attention was given to experiments with reliability/robustness improvement objectives. Webinar aimed at practitioners, engineers, and engineering managers who have testing and experimentation responsibilities.

DOE and Reliability - Presentation

 January 30 - February 4, 2012,  Design for Reliability Seminar - India

We teamed up with our partners in India BE Analytic and gave a DFR seminar in both Bangalore and Pune. In December, 2011 we gave the same seminar in Chennai, Delhi, and Mumbai.

January 23-26, 2012, Reliability, Maintainability, and Availability Symposium (RAMS), Reno, Nevada
About Event: We exhibited at the event and gave the following 6 papers and tutorials at this event. Follow the links for copies.

"The Useful Synergies between Prognostics and HALT and HASS", by Ops A La Carte and RidgeTop Group
"What Is DfR and What it Is Not", by Andre Kleyner and Mike Silverman
"Effective Reliability Program Traits" Tutorial, by Fred Schenkelberg
"Establishing Effective ORT Requirements", by Fred Schenkelberg
"Investment In Reliability Program Versus Return - How To Decide", by Fred Schenkelberg
"How To Select The Right Accelerated Life Test Approach", by Fred Schenkelberg and Mike Silverman

The winner for the raffle for Mike's book "50 Ways to Improve Product Reliability" was John Woodworth at Army Test and Eval Command

The winner for the "Closest to the Pin" (2 inches) in our putting contest was Bryan O'Halloran, Professor at Oregon State University.

 MD&M Webinar - December 15, 2011, FREE WEBINAR

We gave a seminar called "When the Standard Doesn't Fit: How to test using a guidance vs. a standard". 

 BIOMEDevice Show - December 6-7, 2011, San Jose, CA, 10am-4pm

We gave a seminar called "Managing Design Risk". See our The seminar was part of the Innovation Briefs series. The seminar was co-presented by other members of the Product Realization Group (PRG).

Monday Dec 5, 2011 - HALT Calculator Going to the Cloud. We are pleased to announce that our HALT Calculator is in the process of being converted to a cloud-based application so you can access it direclty whenever you need. We will have a payment system in place on-line for quicker access. With the cloud application, we will also be offering either pay by use (you can order as many use credits as you'd like) or yearly subscriptions. The yearly subscriptions work great when you have your own chamber or when you perform many HALTs a year and you would like to run the calculator during HALT planning to set must meet criteria, or when you are in the middle of the test and trying to determine which failures to fix and continue testing. Stay tuned for more details. Coming Q1 2012.

Monday Dec 5, 2011, Mandarin Translation of "50 Ways" Reliability Book , Managing Partner Mike Silverman's book "How Reliable Is Your Product: 50 Ways to Improve Product Reliability" just celebrated its 1 year anniversary of being published, and we are pleased to announce we just finished the Mandarin translation of the book and it is in the process of being published. You can view the 1st 3 Chapters at 50 Ways to Improve Reliability - in Mandarin, or 提高产品可靠性的50种方法. To preorder, please click here and provide your contact information. It will first come out in ebook for $10 and will be available on all the major e-readers. Coming Q1 2012.

Friday December 2, 2011, Medical Risk-Based Testing with IEC60601-1 3rd Edition, FREE WEBINAR by Ops A La Carte and Chart Industries, part of the Ops monthly webinar series.

This webinar focused on IEC60601-1 3rd Edition and Risk-Based testing. The medical industry is moving in a similar direction to many other industries - Risk Based Testing. We will discuss what this means and how to comply. We will highlight each of the clauses in the document and help you decode what each means and how to comply. But more than that, we will show you how to change your approach to testing so that any test you consider, you think of the risks involved before you plan out the test.

It starts with Risk Management (work with Notifying Body / Test House, Regulatory Agencies, Regulatory Affairs Department). FMECAs, FTAs, Fishbone, etc. (Hazards & Risks). Use, Design, Process, and Software FMECAs are typically used as well as System Hazard Analyses. ISO 14971:2009 Application of Risk Management to Medical Devices also plays a big part.

Medical Risk-Based Testing - Presentation

Thursday Nov 10, 2011, Reliability in the Solar Universe, FREE WEBINAR through ASQ, by Ops A La Carte and Concurrent Design.

This webinar focused on the many different types of solar products and reviewed the reliability of each type of product. The universe of solar products is large and expanding exponentially. Most of us are not aware of the manifold applications of solar energy from photovoltaic modules and solar furnaces through manned air travel in planes that never need fuel. Of all of the emerging clean tech industries, the solar industry is one of the most challenging from a reliability engineering perspective because the industry is innovating so rapidly. Customers (and investors) are demanding very high reliability products, exceeding 25 years in many applications. As this industry grows and expands in every direction, with many new and diverse technologies, the core element of reliability will continue to be critical for success, whether we are powering our homes, cars, clothing or sidewalks. Each aspect of a solar product must be considered for reliability. For example, in a solar power installation, the cells, the panels, the trackers, the inverters, even the installation itself, there are opportunities for failures. Whether industrial, commercial or residential, these applications have a high demand for reliability because the solar products will usually be taking the place of an incumbent, and therefore, they must be as good or better.

Reliability in the Universe of Solar Products, by Ops A La Carte and Concurrent Design.

Wednesday Nov 2, 2011,  MD&M Minneapolis - Minneapolis

We gave a seminar called "Medical Device Reliability Testing".  We will be doing this seminar one more time in Anaheim in Feb, 2012.

 Tuesday Nov 1, 2011, Accelerated Reliability Testing for Medical Products - Minnesota

Sponsored by Minnesota Reliability Consortium/IEEE Reliability Society 2011, Chart Industries and Ops A La Carte

Ops A La Carte gave a presentation called "Accelerated Reliability Testing for Medical Products". 

You can download a copy at Accelerated Reliability Testing for Medical Products

 Tuesday Nov 1, 2011, IPC Conference on Reliability - Irvine, CA

We gave a seminar called "Accelerated Life Test Planning for Lead-Free Circuit Card Assemblies".

Wednesday Oct 26, 2011, Improving Product Life Cycle Costs in Today’s Global Manufacturing Environment - Boston, MA

About Event: We had presenters for this event. The presenters and their topics are shown below. The event is also being sponsored by the Boston chapter of the IEEE Reliability Society. You can download each presentation in the links below.

Ops A La Carte: "Using Design for Reliability (DfR) to reduce Product Life Cycle Costs", by Mike Silverman, Ops A La Carte
Agilent: "The economics of diagnostics and repair in development, production, and support", by Duane Lowenstein, Agilent
Camstar: "Holistic view of quality", by Nader Fathi, Camstar
Enterasys: "Real world savings?", by Brad Martin, VP Operations and Quality at Enterasys

Friday Oct 21, 2011 ASQ Silicon Valley Section Quality Conference - Santa Clara, CA

About Event: The theme for this year was "On The Road to Performance Excellence"

OPS' exhibited at the event through the Product Realization Group and will participate in a presentation at the event.

Also, Fred Schenkelberg of Ops gave a presentation on "How to Select the Right Accelerated Life Testing Methodology".

Wednesday Oct 12, 2011 ASQ San Diego Event: Another Look at Today's Reliability Engineer - San Diego, CA

Speakers: Gerry Cohen, Senior Reliability Engineer, Ops A La Carte

Tuesday Oct 11th, Integrating Simulation into a Reliability Program, FREE WEBINAR, by Ops A La Carte and Tribal Engineering. Simulation and testing often go together as part of a strong reliability program. Finite element simulation provides data and insights that would be difficult or impossible to obtain from testing alone. Simulation gives results for all components, including those that are inaccessible, and over a wide range of conditions. The results from simulation can be critical parts of accelerated life test programs such as HALT and ALT. In this seminar, we showed techniques to integrate these tools into a reliability program to optimize your reliability results.

Integrating Simulation - Presentation

Accelerated Stress Testing and Reliability (ASTR) Workshop - Sept 28-30, 2011

We gave 4 presentations at the event. You can download them using the following links:

- Application of HALT for Reliability Evaluation of Electronics Modules, by Peter Arrowsmith, Ops A La Carte
- Electromechanical Device Design Methods for Reliability Improvement, by Lou LaVallee, Ops A La Carte
- Useful Synergies Between Prognostics and HALT and HASS, by Mike Silverman, Ops A La Carte

We also gave away a free copy of Mike's new book. The winner of the book was Greg Bauer of Anritsu.

Wednesday Sep 22, 2011,  MD&M Chicago

We gave a seminar called "Medical Device Reliability Testing".  We will be doing this seminar one more time in Anaheim in Feb, 2012.

Sep 5, 2011

Ops A La Carte's Managing Partner Mike Silverman traveled around the US and the world giving seminars and visiting with clients, He was in the following locations:

Sept 6 - Boston
Sept 7-8 - New Jersey
Sept 13-14 - San Diego
Sept 15-16 - Denver
Sept 19 - Milwaukee
Sep 20-22 - Chicago
Oct 24-27 - Boston
Oct 31-Nov 2 - Minneapolis

Whenever OPS visits a city, we offer 1 hour of free consultation to help you with any aspect of your reliability program. Please let us know if you would like for us to visit your company.

Sep 2, 2011

HALT Calculator Testimonial

Enecsys endorses HALT Calculator with this testimonial.

"Enecsys has adopted the Ops A La Carte AFR calculation technique as it is impractical to conduct MTBF demonstration tests on highly reliable products such as solar micro inverters. Furthermore, using an MTBF number in isolation fails to provide any meaningful product life metrics. The Enecsys reliability engineering process is one that integrates multiple test and analysis approaches, of which AFR calculation represents a component part, placing Enecsys in the unique position of being able to present AFR metrics to the solar industry. We have found this technique to be easy to use and due to the fact that it takes into account the significant HALT margins that we have achieved, we are satisfied that it delivers accurate and meaningful results. Enecsys plans to continue using AFR calculation on future products, and embracing this technique underlines Enecsys' commitment to continuously improving micro inverter reliability, while being positioned firmly at the forefront of micro inverter reliability engineering technology."

Mark Turner, Director of Reliability, Enecsys

Aug 20, 2011

Ops' starts the semi-annual Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE) Certificate course. We have been teaching this course twice a year for 14 straight years. Four years ago, we started teaching the course via webinar and now the webinar attendees outnumber the live attendees. This semester we started a new private tutoring program for students that can't attend the lectures due to the time zone difference. The program consists of one-on-one tutoring sessions plus access to our recorded sessions.

For more information on our CRE Course, go to CRE_Course

Aug 9, 2011

Ops A La Carte's Managing Partner Mike Silverman was interviewed on BlogTalkRadio on Mike's new book "How Reliable Is Your Product: 50 Ways to Improve Product Reliability". You can listen to the recording

Host Wayne Hurlbert also reviewed Mike's book. Other reviews can be found at All Book Reviews

June 23, 2011

Ops A La Carte presents at annual IEEE Prognostics Conference, Denver. Here is the link to the presentation and paper.

Useful Synergies between Prognostics and HALT and HASS - Presentation
Useful Synergies between Prognostics and HALT and HASS - Paper

June 16, 2011

OPS holds annual Open House to over 100 visitors. This was our biggest open house in our 10 year history, which is fitting because the open house was in honor of our 10 year anniversary along with our joint partnership with Chart. The event was co-sponsored by the IIEEE Components, Packaging, & Manufacturing Technology (CPMT) and IEEE Reliability Societies. and Reliability Society.

The open house had a barbeque, RC car races, seminars on Advanced HALT Techniques, and poster sessions on reliability solutions and chamber/piping techniques. Great education AND lots of fun !!

We also gave away an IPAD and the winner was Larry Pennington. Pictures below are highlights:

More Open House Pictures

June 10, 2011

Ops A La Carte presents on two topics at annual Applied Reliability Symposium, San Diego. Here are links to both presentations;

50 Ways to Improve Product Reliability
What is DfR and What is Not DfR

June 6, 2011

Ops A La Carte gives one day course at Medical show MD&M in New York on Medical Reliability Testing. We will be giving this course two more times this year:

MD&M Chicago - Thursday, Sept 22, 2011
MD&M Minneapolis - Wednesday Nov 2, 2011

May 31, 2011

10 YEARS OF OPS - In May 2011, Ops A La Carte officially turns 10 years old. In these past 10 years, we grew from an an idea to a global consulting firm with customers in over 100 different industries in over 30 different countries. Thank you all for your patronage over this past decade.Ops turns 10 years old. See below for highlights from the best of Ops over the past 10 years.

May 30, 2011

 Ops' Managing Partner Mike Silverman traveled around the US and Canada giving seminars and visiting with clients.  He was in the following locations:  Boston/Rhode Island the week of May 23rd, Toronto and Rochester the week of May 30, and San Diego the week of June 6.  Whenever OPS visits cities, we offer 1 hour of free consultation to help you with any aspect of your reliability program.

May 28, 2011

FREE Monthly Webinar Series a big hit

About Event: On the first Wednesday of each month, we have been holding free webinars and attendance continues to grow. Below is the lineup we have had so far this year. We have more great free webinars coming up the rest of the year. See the NewsEvents for the future lineup of webinars.

Tuesday April 5th - Reliability in the Universe of Solar Products, by Ops A La Carte and Concurrent Design.

Wednesday May 4th - Reliability and Quality Engineering Integration using DFSS and DFR Methods.

Wednesday June 1st - Useful Synergies between Prognostics and HALT and HASS, by Ops A La Carte and Ridgetop Group.

May 25, 2011

Fred Schenkelberg of OPS gives Reliability Talk at ASQ NCBDG Roundtable @ Stellartech Research Corporation, Sunnyvale, CA

Fred will give a talk at the Northern California Biodevice Group of the American Society of Quality.

TITLE: Ensuring a Reliable Product

ABSTRACT: Every medical device has an expectation to be safe and reliable. Focusing on product reliability, this talk will lead a discussion around useful and not so useful practices. The terms we use and the methods employed possibly establish a valuable culture within an organization that permits the achievement of high quality and very reliable products. Using appropriate goals, measures, and tools to understand and discuss product reliability permits the appropriate tradeoff of design functionality, cost and time to market along with reliability.

May 24, 2011

Telcordia SR332 Reliability Prediction Procedure Updated

Telcordia SR332 Reliability Prediction Procedure Updated to Issue 3
The most popular reliability prediction guide, Telcordia SR-332, was recently updated to Issue 3. We have updated our prediction tool and can now provide predictions to this latest document. A few of the changes were:

- Updated failure rates
- New parts
- Updated Pi factors & descriptions

BACKGROUND: in the 60's and 70's the most popular reference document was MIL-HDBK-217. This document has not been updated since 217F Notice2 came out in the early 90's. Committees are working on the next generation 217 document but have not replaced 217. Back in the late 80's, Bell Communication Research (a division of Bell Labs and now called Telcordia), came out with their version to be used for commercial products. In the past 20 years, this reference document has become increasingly more popular and has been updated 9 times in the past 20 years to keep up with new technologies and changing failure rates. This latest revision, Issue 3, was released earlier this year (January, 2011).

- May 19, 2011

OALC consultant Steve Brenner taught a seminar on MIL-STD-810 Testing at NTS-SGS Labs in Munich Germany on May 16 - 19.

- May 13, 2011

2011 Reliability Symposium, May 9-13 in Santa Clara, California

We held our 4th annual Reliability Symposium and had engineers traveling from around the world as far as Singapore attend the event. We also had people attend via webinar from as far away as the Czech Republic.

- May 11, 2011

Ops A La Carte and Chart Announce a Joint Alliance

Ops A La Carte and Chart announce a joint alliance with the installation of a Chart REAL-36 HALT chamber at Ops A La Carte's Santa Clara test facility HALT and HASS Labs.

"We are very excited to gain access to Chart's worldwide reach of customers in the HALT/HASS marketplace.  We expect to grow both our consulting and lab businesses as a result of this new alliance," says Ops Managing Partner, Mike Silverman.

"Chart is excited to be able to offer Ops A La Carte's broad range of services to our rapidly growing customer base.  The range of expertise offered by Ops A La Carte enables Chart to offer the HALT/HASS market the most complete system solution available anywhere," says Chart Product Manager, Dan Strom.

Click here for full story

- May 1, 2011

OPS Consulting Team News

Ops adds a new consultant Angele Sjong and Sanchan Modi to our company

Angele Sjong, PhD (Boulder, CO) is a senior Chemical Reliability Engineer with Ops A La Carte and president of Sjong Consulting LLC.  Sjong Consulting partners with Ops A La Carte in the areas of materials engineering, polymers and chemistry.   Angele holds Ph.D. degree in Inorganic Chemistry from Yale University and M.S. in metallurgical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines.  She has been a technical consultant on issues related to product liability, patent infringement and failure analysis.  She has provided technical consulting services to companies on pressure vessels and piping; consumer electronics;recreational equipment; consumer products; and automotive equipment.  She has been an expert witness for litigation cases involving ferrous metallurgy, corrosion and glass.  Angele has also been active with ASM, and taught a polymers failure analysis class to medical device engineers. 

Sanchan Modi (Santa Clara, CA) is in the graduate program in Mechanical Engineering at San Jose State University. He holds a B. Technology in Mechanical Engineering from D.A.V Institute of Engineering and Technology, India. He is currently working on effects of “Thermally Induced Stresses on 3D Stacked TSV Packages”. He also worked on gear box design for both wheel drive motor cycle. Sanchan works in our HALT and HASS Labs helping clients with both fixturing as well as HALT execution. 

In addition, two of our existing consultants Fred Schenkelberg and Bill Holt who are taking on new roles at OPS.

Fred Schenkelberg, MS,. CRE/CQE(San Jose, CA) is going to head up OPS' Solutions sector, coming up with sets of services we will be combining into monthly packages. Fred has been with Ops A La Carte for 7 years and in that time, he has worked with over 100 clients on over 300 different projects.  Fred has over 20 years of experience in reliability engineering, reliability management and reliability training. Fred has developed state-of-the-art techniques in assessing companies' reliability capabilities from which he develops and executes custom reliability programs. Also, he exercises his reliability engineering and statistical knowledge to design and conduct accelerated life tests. Fred worked for 8 years at HP and co-founded the HP Product Reliability Team. Fred has also worked in a variety of other industries, including Contract Manufacturing and Material Science companies. Fred is very active in the reliability community. Here are a few of Fred's affiliations:
- ASQ Reliability Division Chair
- RAMS Committee
- RMSP - Director of Education
- IEC Dependability standards (Tag56 group) Expert in the US TAG to the IEC TC 56  
- IEEE Reliability Society Silicon Valley Vice Chair
- Program Co-Chair of the ASQ Section 613 (Silicon Valley) Section 2011 Quality Conference
- Technical Program Co-Chair of the 2011 ASTR

Bill Holt (San Jose, CA) is going to head up OPS' Telecom/Networking/Consumer Electronics practice. Bill has been with OPS for over 3 years and in that time, he has worked on a number of different networking and consumer electronics products. Bill has over 20 years experience in reliability engineering & management. Topics addressed during that tenure range from atomic-level device elements to very large networks, primarily in the high-tech industry. Significant experience working for companies in a variety of high-tech industry sectors, including personal electronics, mobile telephones, & computer hardware, application-specific devices, generic integrated circuits, & electronic components, computer networking hardware, satellite communications systems & hardware, and optical and microwave devices. Bill's experience working in start-up businesses and high demand environments has provided skills necessary for being able to effectively address hardware reliability in a creative and effective manner.

See the Ops Team for more details on each consultant

- April 30, 2011

Ops' consultant Pavel Urban of Eastern Europe is cooperating with Continental

Details of the project cannot be disclosed at this time.

- April 15, 2011

Ops' Boston Reliability Lab moves from Cambridge to Bedford.

We completed the move of our HALT Lab from Cambridge to Bedford, and this should help serve our east coast customers better because it is more centrally located in the Boston high tech corridor. The new address is 6 Crosby Drive.

- April 13, 2011

OPS' Mike Silverman Gives Presentation at ASQ Statistics Society Meeting

OPS' Managing Partner Mike Silverman gives a presentation on "HALT-to-AFR Calculator" at the April ASQ Statistics Society meeting for the Santa Clara chapter. The presentation focused on the new SaaS calculator OPS' uses that can take HALT data and predict your field failure rate.

- April 8, 2011

OPS' Mike Silverman Receives Another Great Review on His New Book

Clifton A. Ericson II, Editor of the Journal of System Safety writes "When was the last time you read an engineering book that you couldn’t put down, or that didn’t put you down (to sleep)? With How Reliable is Your Product?, author Mike Silverman has delivered what few manage to achieve… a book on Reliability engineering that is useful, practical and interesting. In addition, Mike has nicely woven into the material just enough humor to keep the book out of the usual stuffy engineering category. "More>>

- April 6, 2011

OPS' Mike Silverman Gives Presentation at IEEE Reliability Society Meeting

OPS' Managing Partner Mike Silverman gives a presentation on "What Is and What Is Not DfR" at the April IEEE Reliability Society meeting for the Santa Clara chapter.

- April 1, 2011

"50 Ways" book Now Available on iPad

Mike Silverman's book "How Reliable Is Your Product: 50 Ways to Improve Product Reliability" is now available on the iPad. You can download at iPad.

- March 22, 2011

Ops is Interviewed by Bill Marlow

Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman was interviewed by Bill Marlow of the Bill Marlow Show. Look for it at Bill Marlow Show. Listen to the podcast at Book_Interview

- March 22, 2011

"How Reliable Is Your Product" Book Signing Meetup Event

We held our book signing party and gave away free signed books. During this session, Mike covered: 

- Practical guide to improving your product reliability
- Case studies/examples of companies and industries that are leaders in reliability
- Pitfalls to avoid when developing new products
- How to optimize reliability, maximize profits, and delight your customers

- March 8, 2011

Ops' Mike Silverman Receives Another Great Review on His New Book

PCB News writes "This is a very comprehensive volume--a book that you keep at your side, on your desk close at hand rather than up on your shelf. What I like about this book is the way that Silverman is able to take a pretty serious and, face it, a bit dry discipline and bring it to life with real world examples we can understand. His clear and interesting way of explaining sometimes difficult subjects reminds me of the late Carl Sagan."

- March 3, 2011

Event: Implantable Medical Device Design for Reliability

About Event: Mike Silverman of Ops along with Charlie Dingus of Intrapace gave a free seminar at SPMTech's "Meet the Experts" event in Santa Clara, CA. The topic if their talk was on Reliability of Implantable Medical Devices.

- March 1, 2011

Ops Consultant Lou LaVallee is awarded Patent 7899756

Lou received a patent for the work on "Critical Parameter/Requirements Management Process and Environment".

The patent was for a unique requirement management process for product  development.  An enterprise wide tool was developed and deployed  using object oriented code based on this patent. The tool was being integrated with other product development tools, such as a document-driven requirements management, configuration management, manufacturing/production control system, problem management, and phased product delivery process tools. 

Lou performed this work in collaboration with colleagues at Xerox as well as faculty at MIT.

- February 25, 2011

ECN Magazine writes "Mike's book unlocks secrets to optimizing product reliability"

SMT Magazine writes "Mike provides hands on teaching principals, case studies and facts to help companies optimize the reliability of their products"

- February 20, 2011

Ops brings on consultant from Czech Republic and opens a new market for us in Eastern Europe

Pavel Urban (Czech Republic) has over 13 years experience in the areas of reliability and new product development. He has been responsible for product/process quality and reliability within all phases of product lifecycle from idea generation until end of product life. He worked for one of the largest automotive industry suppliers which produces a broad range of electronic components. Since 2010, Urban founded PDEE which operates in Eastern Europe region to provide knowledge and expertise to product development companies. He provides complex product development solutions for clients from idea identification to product launch with a focus on product reliability and robustness, accelerating of time to market and cost reduction. Design for Reliability is a key element of product development process and PDEE brings this approach to clients. PDEE offers several kinds of cooperation such as workshops/training, consultation, and testing. Pavel currently works for customers such as Continental and others from various market segments. He is certified in Six Sigma within Freescale Semiconductor and a board member of the Product Development & Management Association Eastern Europe. Pavel heads up Ops A La Carte’s Eastern European consulting practice. See the Ops Team for more details.

Event: Seminar on Testing at NTS
Date: February 10, 2011, 10am-2pm
Location: Fullerton, CA

About Event: Steve Brenner and Mike Silverman of Ops gave a free seminar at NTS in Fullerton on accelerated testing and the importance of a good test plan. Links to the presentation and webcast are shown below.

- Presentation on Practical Reliability Testing
- Webcast on Practical Reliability Testing

Event: Components for Military and Space Electronics (CMSE)
Date: February 7-10, 2011
Location: Los Angeles, CA

About Event: CMSE is the premier conference on the engineering, design and use of electronic components in military and space systems. We gave a presentation at this event on Soft Errors. The link to the presentation is below.

-Soft Error Trends and Mitigation Techniques in Modern Memory Technology by Charlie Slayman

Event: Reliability, Maintainability, and Availability Symposium (RAMS)
Date: January 24-27, 2011
Location: Orlando, Florida

About Event: RAMS is the premier event in the reliability, availability, and maintainability engineering disciplines. Combining tutorials, presentations, CEUs, certifications, and networking into one week-long program, the RAMS delivers cutting edge information to all technical industries.

Ops had a booth at this event. We raffled off a copy of my new book "How Reliable Is Your Product: 50 Ways to Improve Product Reliability" and the winner was Alexandre Facini Dos Santos of Alstom Brazil. Congratulations Alexandre.

Also, we gave the following Tutorials, Technical Presentations, and Panel Discussions. Links to the presentations are shown below

TUTORIALS

- Introduction to RAM Management by Fred Schenkelberg
- Effective Reliability Program Traits by Fred Schenkelberg
- System Safety Engineering by Dev Raheja

TECHNICAL PRESENTATIONS

- Green Reliability by Mike Silverman
- Soft Error Trends and Mitigation Techniques in Modern Memory Technology by Charlie Slayman

Event: Seminar at Toyo in Tokyo
Date: January 18, 2011, 9-4pm
Location: Tokyo, Japan

About Event: Mike Silverman presented a seminar on "HALT Integrated into a Reliability Program"

Tour/Event: Ops to Visit Taiwan, China, and Japan in January
Date: January , 2011

About Tour: Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman visited Taiwan, China and Japan in January, meeting with Ops' reps in the area as well as numerous prospects and clients.

- January 3-7 Taiwan
- January 10-16 China
- January 17-23 Japan

Event: Webinar on Profitability Through Business Excellence in the Product Realization Process
Date: Thursday, Dec 16, 2010
Location: Webinar

About Event: Ops A La Carte and the Product Realization Group put on a presentation by Indra Desai. Many great products never make it to volume because key steps in are skipped or executed in ways that prevent shipping high quality products. In this session you will learn current best practices for building quality into the product realization process.

- Profitability Through Business Excellence by Indra Desai

Event: Webinar/Seminar on Lead Free Future Challenges
Date: Dec 9, 2010
Location: Webinar and Live Seminar at Celestica Toronto

About Event: Ops A La Carte, Celestica, and Design Chain Associates teamed up to provide you with three presentations on the current state of knowledge of lead-free electronics reliability and future challenges driven by environmental requirements. The link to each presentation is shown below.

- Ops A La Carte Overview Presentation by Peter Arrowsmith, Ops A La Carte
- Lead-Free: It's only the Beginning by Michael Kirshner, Design Chain Associates
- Lead-Free Electronics: What is left to implement? by Heather McCormick, Celestica, Toronto
- Lead-Free Electronics: The Tin Whisker Challenge by Polina Snugovsky, Celestica, Toronto

- Webcast for Lead Free Event

- December 5, 2010

Ops announces Pre-Release of Mike Silverman's New Book

Mike Silverman's book "How Reliable Is Your Product: 50 Ways to Improve Your Product Reliability" is due out in January 2011 and is available for Pre-Release Purchase at a 10% discount. The 340 page book is available in hardback and ebook.

- December 1, 2010

Ops is Interviewed by SMT Magazine

Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman was interviewed by Marcy LaRont of i-Connect007, part of SMT Magazine. The title of the article is "Electronics Reliability and Product Development." Look for it at http://www.ems007.com/pages/zone.cgi?a=73025.

November 12, 2010

Ops A La Carte Holds Annual Open House: Ops A La Carte holds Open House at its newly remodeled facility. Ops' partners PRG, Voler, and Fusion Design also participate at the open house, giving us a chance to show our power of our combined resources. We also had product demonstrations from three other companies - Alter-G and Ethologics. Below are pictures of the Alter-G Anti Gravity Treadmill at our open house, along with attendees trying out the system.

Also, congratulations to the grand prize winner at our Open House - Vince Sullivan of Stellartech who won a shiatsu massage chair. Vince won by getting the most right answers to our Wacky Medical Trivia quiz with 5 correct answers. Take this QUIZ and see how many you can get right. If you take the quiz and beat Vince's score, I will give you a free copy of my new book.

November 11, 2010

Ops A La Carte and PRG Deliver Presentation at BIOMEDevice Show in San Jose (Nov 10-11), the ASQ Quality Conf. in Santa Clara (Oct 21-22), and the SMTA Medical Conf. in Phoenix (Sept 22-23): Ops A La Carte and two other Product Realization Group's partners - Voler Systems and Fusion Design - teamed up, sharing a booth and delivering a joint presentation on how we successfully collaborate on projects together. If you would like to see the slides from our presentation, please go to:

- Outsourcing Product Development to a Multidiscipline Team of Specialists - A Success Story

Highlights of this presentation are also shown in the Fall 2010 Newsletter Featured Service.

Congratulations to Henry Pastorelli of OptiMedica (left) and Silvia Milanez of Abbott Vascular (right) for winning our grand prize - an RC Helicopter. Henry won at the BIOMEDevice show and Silvia won at the ASQ Quality Conference.

November 2, 2010

Ops A La Carte Exhibits at ISSRE in San Jose

Ops A La Carte's Bob Mueller and Mike Silverman exhibit at the 21st annual International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2010) event held this year at Cisco in San Jose. Bob and Mike were there to show off their new developments in Software Reliability. For a download of the slides Bob and Mike showed at the event, please go to:

- Software Reliability Slides

For a download of Bob's Software Reliability Webinar given earlier in the year, please go to:

To view the slides for the event, go to: Software Reliability Seminar
To view the webinar stream, go to: Software Reliability Webinar Recording (passcode: "swquality")

November 1, 2010

Webinar on Best Reliability Practices for Medical Devices

Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman and Chet Haibel provided a webinar on best practices for medical device design and development along with a few interesting case studies. If you would like to see the slides or the broadcast of the event, please go to:

- Best Reliability Practices for Medical Devices Webinar Slides
- Best Reliability Practices for Medical Devices Webinar Webcast

October 28, 2010

Ops Provides Training for PRG/Foothill College

Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman provides a 4 part training class as part of the Product Realization Group's Certificate Program in affiliation with Foothill College. The program consists of 5 subjects, one subject per month for 5 months. The Product Realization Certificate Program provides an opportunity for individuals, group managers and senior management, who are involved in the development and release of high technology products, to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the product realization process.

October 25, 2010

Ops' Martin Shaw Receives Best Paper Award

Ops A La Carte's Martin Shaw received the best paper award at the annual Applied Reliability Symposium Asia in Singapore in October 2010 on LCD TV Accelerated Testing. He also won the same award for his presentation at the Applied Reliability Symposium Europe in Berlin in March 2010. If you would like to see the slides from his presentation, please go to:

- LCD_TV_Accelerated_Testing

October 8, 2010

Ops A La Carte Presents at annual ASTR in Denver

Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman, Charlie Slayman, and Martin Shaw all gave presentations at this year's Accelerated Stress Testing and Reliability (ASTR) Workshop. If you would like to see the slides from our presentation, please go to:

- What Is HALT and What Is Not HALT by Mike Silverman
- Acceleration Factors for Neutron Beam Soft Error Testing by Charlie Slayman
- LCD TV Accelerated Testing by Martin Shaw

Congratulations to Vins Fan of Chroma for winning our grand prize - a new golf ball return device - for getting closest to the pin in our putting contest. Vins put our 50 foot put within 5 inches of the hole.

September 22, 2010

Ops Presents at Local Medical Device Event Ops A La Carte's Managing Partner Mike Silverman and Integrated Compliance Engineer's President Aaron Joseph presented at the SMPTech "Meet the Experts" Forum. Below are links to Mike and Aaron's presentations:

- Reliability Challenges in the Medical Industry by Mike Silverman
- Medical Product Design and Validation by Aaron Joseph

- September 1, 2010

Ops adds a new consultant to our company:

Stephen Haytt, PhD, CRE, CQE (San Jose, CA) has 15 years of experience between Manufacturing, New Product Introduction, and Development. All his degrees and background are in materials science and engineering, encompassing solid states physics, mechanics of materials, fatigue and fracture, metallurgy, corrosion of metals, ceramics, glass, and fiber optics, and plasma processing of materials - as in the deposition and etching of materials. Mr. Hyatt earned his doctorate degree from the University of Windsor (Ontario, Canada). Mr. Hyatt has extensive experience working with materials characterization techniques, as the different methods for electron excitation and analysis of the resulting spectrographs, transmission electron microscopy used for high spatial resolution materials analysis, and x-rays topography using synchrotron radiation. Stephen is a CRE and CQE. See the Ops Team for more details.

Also, two Ops consultants have relocated. Gerry Cohen moved from Los Angeles to South Carolina and Edward Smith moved from San Jose to Pennsylvania. Both consultants will begin servicing our clients in their new local areas.

- August 20, 2010

Product Realization Group Symposium / Summer Barbeque

The symposium comprised of 4 sessions in 2 tracks - CleanTech, MedTech, NPI, and PRG Certification Overview.

We presented a paper on CleanTech Reliability

Attached also is the slide set describing the PRG Certification Course

Here are a few pictures from the event. Left is John Cooper of Ops A La Carte presenting on the PRG Certificate program. In the center is the Ops booth at the event. On the right is the tasty BBQ area.

- August 17, 2010

Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE) Class Started

On Tuesday, August 17th, we began our 7 week CRE training class to help individuals pass the CRE Exam, sponsored by ASQ and IEEE. This was the largest class we have had in over 4 years. About 2/3 of the students are taking the class via webconference and the other 1/3 are attending live. We added a second instructor for the course. The head instructor provides instruction for all the students and also works with the live students on problem solving. The second instructor monitors for questions from the on-line students and works with them on problem solving.

- August 1, 2010

Ops A La Carte Web Video

We completed a two minute video of our company, including our consulting, testing, and training options. You can view the video below as well as on the main page of our site.

Note that if the video loads slowly, you can try the YouTube version instead

- July 14, 2010

ASQ Statistics Society talk on Reliability

Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman was a panelist for the discussion topic on "Trends in Reliability". Also on the panel was Dr. Dave Trindade and Reza Azarkhail. Dr. John Flaig was the moderator.

- July 7, 2010

In memory of Gregg Hobbs

Dr. Gregg Hobbs was truly an amazing man - an inventor, a mentor to thousands. He is credited for coining the terms HALT and HASS back in 1988 and since then has evangelized around the world and made HALT and HASS common terms in the world of engineering. Gregg was also a personal friend to Ops A La Carte founder Mike Silverman. Gregg and Mike gave joint seminars around the world together. Gregg passed away on July 7th and the industry will truly miss his ingenuity and his spirit.

- June 15, 2010

Applied Reliability Symposium talk

We presented a paper on:From HALT Results To An Accurate Field MTBF Estimate

We also exhibited at this event. See picture below and left. Present were (left to right) Jim McLinn, Doug Farel, and Mike Silverman. Also, congratulations to Taeho Crispin, the winner of our "closest to the pin" putting contest. See picture below and right.

- June 8, 2010

Green Technology Reliability Seminar

Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman gave a presentation along with several industry speakers, including Paul Parker from Solar Bridge and Nathan Reddy from Polycom. Event was sponsored by Ops A La Carte, DLI Labs, and DfR Solutions.

To view the slides for the event, go to: Green Reliability Seminar

To view the webinar stream, go to: Green Reliability Webinar Recording

- June 4, 2010

Software Reliability Seminar

Ops A La Carte's Bob Mueller and Voler System's Walt Maclay gave a 2 hour presentation on Software Reliability.

To view the slides for the event, go to: Software Reliability Seminar

To view the webinar stream, go to: Software Reliability Webinar Recording (passcode: "swquality")

- May 26, 2010

Presentation on "Impact and Mitigation of DRAM and SRAM Soft Errors

Charlie Slayman of Ops A La Carte gave this presentation at our monthly IEEE Reliability Society meeting. We also broadcast this via webinar. If you would like to see the slides or the broadcast of the event, please go to:

- Impact and Mitigation of DRAM and SRAM Soft Errors Presentation
- Impact and Mitigation of DRAM and SRAM Soft Errors Webinar

Charlie also gave similar talks at several other conferences through the summer, including:

1) IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS), May 2-6, 2010 Anaheim CA
Tutorial: Mechanisms, Modeling, Measurements and Mitigation of Soft Errors
Instructors: Charles Slayman (Ops A La Carte), Kevin Warren (Vanderbilt University), Jeff Wilkinson (Medtronic)
Abstract: Soft errors continue to be a key reliability concern for electronics. Unlike hard failures, a soft error's transient nature and varying manifestations makes it difficult to develop appropriate strategies for test and characterization. Without reliable data on the rate and modes of occurrence it is not possible to know if a system can meet its reliability objectives or to design appropriate mitigations.

2) IEEE International On-Line Test Symposium (IOLTS), July 5-7,2010 Korfu, Greece
Panel Discussion: SER Standards – Where are we? What’s next?”,
Panel Members: Eishi Ibe (Hitachi), Robert Baumann (Texas Instruments), Sana Rezgui (Actel), Dan Alexandrescu (iRoC Technologies), Antonin Bougerol (EADS), Philippe Roche (ST Microelectronics) and Charles Slayman (Ops A La Carte).
Abstract: JEDEC Standard JESD89A was revised in 2006 for soft error testing from alpha-ray, thermal neutron, spallation neutron, (quasi-mono) energetic neutron and high-altitude/underground field tests. The Japanese guildeline EIAJ EDR4705 was issued in 2005 with similar scope. Recent work, however, have revealed that basic assumptions are outdated and the standards need to be revised.

3) IEEE Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference (NSREC), July 19-23, 2010 Denver CO
Title: Theoretical Correlation of Broad Spectrum Neutron Sources for Accelerated Soft Error Testing
Author: Charles Slayman
Abstract: Several broad spectrum high energy neutron source facilities exist throughout the world for accelerated soft error testing. However, none accurately replicate the terrestrial neutron spectra across the range of 1MeV to 1GeV. The objective of this study is to quantify the errors introduced in accelerated soft error measurements from these facilities using a range of theoretical soft error cross-sections for both high and low critical charge events.

- May 17-20, 2010

Ops Consultant Peter Arrowsmith presented his paper at the International Conference on Solder and Reliability (ICSR)

on ZIF Connector Failure Analysis. You are welcome to download the paper.

- May 15, 2010

Ops adds two new consultants to our company:

Charlie Slayman, PhD (San Jose, CA) has held positions at Hughes Research Labs in optical/microwave device research, Cypress Semiconductor as R&D Pilot Line Manager, Alliance Semiconductor as Foundry Operations Manager and Sun Microsystems as SPARC Supply Engineering Manager and Senior Member of the Technical Staff in memory reliability.  He has also participated in various task groups responsible for the JEDEC soft error standards (JESD89, JESD89-1, JESD89-2 and JESD89-3) and served as the chair of the Soft Error Committee for IRPS 2008 and 2009. See the Ops Team for more details.

Matt Lashinsky, MSME (San Diego) Matt has years of experience in multiple domains of engineering including reliability, product development, electronics packaging, manufacturing, project management in industries ranging from telecommunications to renewable energy, to automotive and construction plastics, to irrigation systems and education.   Matt’s education consists of 2 undergraduate degrees, BS in mechanical engineering and Bachelor’s in Mathematics, while also holding a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, focusing in Fluid Mechanics, Turbulence, and Propulsion.. See the Ops Team for more details.

- May 6, 2010

Del Mar Electronics Show presentation on "Design for Reliability"

Ops A La Carte gave a presentation at the Del Mar Electronics Show on the topic of Design for Reliability

- April 27, 2010

"How to Avoid Being the Next Toyota" Safety Talk

Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman teams up with Eugene Heil of Lewis Bass International and Ken Kapur of KLA to lead a panel discussion at the monthly IEEE Safety Society meeting (which we combined with the IEEE Reliability Society Meeting. The topic was on How to Avoid Being the Next Toyota.

- April 19-23, 2010

Design for Excellence (DfX) Symposium

We held our first of three DfX Symposia for this year, collaborating with DfR Solutions. Our next one will be in Austin, TX the week of October 11th. Details can be found in our Education Schedule.

- March 1, 2010

Ops A La Carte opens East Coast HALT and HASS facility.

In addition to our west coast HALT Lab in Santa Clara California, now we have an east coast Lab in Cambridge Massachusetts. In conjunction with this, Ops announces a strategic alliance with east coast reliability consulting firm System Effectiveness Associates (SEA). SEA is a 20 year old reliability consulting firm run by Peter Bachant. We are very excited to start working with Peter's firm. We have heard so much about SEA for years and are glad we now have the chance to partner with them because of their talent as well as their proximtiy to our east coast customers. And this is going to really help service our east coast HALT customers at our lab in Cambridge.

- February 15, 2010

Ops adds two new consultants to our company:

Jim McLinn, MS, CRE/CQE (Minnesota) has over 35 years experience in the area of reliability and quality. His specialties include product and process improvement using techniques such as DfR for Electronics and Mechanical systems as well as statistics. He is a RAMS committee member. See the Ops Team for more details.

Bob Baker, MBA, PE (Texas) has over 40 years experience in quality, reliability, and program management. Bob is an expert in business process improvement and quality management system implementation for clients in diverse businesses and industries. See the Ops Team for more details.

- February 11, 2010

Ops A La Carte and Wyle Labs hosted a free 1/2 day Design for Reliability seminar. Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman was the presenter. Over 200 people attended the seminar both live and via webinar. See DFRSeminar for a copy of the presentation.

- February 10, 2010

Ops A La Carte's well known reliability consultant Mike Silverman gave a presentation at the annual Components for Military and Space Electronics (CMSE) Symposium. The title of Mike's presentation was:

New Fast Method for Determining Product MTBF

- February 8, 2010

Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman gave a presentation at the annual Medical Design and Manufacturing Show. The title of Mike's presentation was:

Integrating HALT with the Medical Product Life Cycle

- January 25-28, 2010

- Ops presents 4 papers and 2 tutorials at the annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS):

- How to Design a Better Reliability Test Program by Mike Silverman
- Using Electronic Design Automation throughout the Product Life Cycle by Bryan Stallard and Mike Silverman
- Estimating Field Failure Rate from the Results of HALT by Harry McLean and Mike Silverman
- Design for Reliability in Medical Devices by Dev Raheja and Vaishali Hegde of Philips Respironics

TUTORIALS:

- Reliability Demonstration Theory and Application by Andre Kleyner
- System Safety in a Variety of Industries by Dev Raheja

Also congratulations to Ed Flower for winning our "closest to the hole" putting contest. Ed putted the 50 foot shot to within 2 inches of the hole. Ed won a brand new Ping putter.The left picture below is Ops A La Carte's Managing Partner Mike Silverman congratulating Ed for winning. Next to it is a picture of Jay Pisharodi and Peter Arrowsmith. In the center is a picture of Ops consultants left to right Andre Kleyner, Peter Arrowwmith, and Jay Pisharodi with managing partner Mike Silverman on the right.. Second from the right is Ed's winning put 2 inches from the pin. On the far right is managing partner Mike Silverman having a go at the putting.

- January 14, 2010

- Ops A La Carte was quoted in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, January 14th. They were interviewed by the Wall Street Journal in an article on "Three Best Ways to Win a New Client." To see the full article, go to WallStreetJournal_Article.

- December 11, 2009

- Ops A La Carte holds an open house at their test lab HALT and HASS Labs in Santa Clara, CA. The open house was by invitation only specifically targeted to the medical market, piggybacking on the BIOMEDevice expo the day before. Voler Systems (a design firm) and SigmaQuest (a quality database solutions provider) co-sponsored the event. We had over 20 partners and 60 customers attend the open house. Seven of the 20 partners set up booths and had poster sessions about their business. We also had 3 customer demonstrations set up. All in all, it was a great success.

Also congratulations to the three prize winners at the open house.

Juan Adames won the grand prize with 5 correct answers to our trivia quiz. Anna Lin of Chansu Consulting got second place with 4 correct answers. Here is a list of example questions:

1) In the US, the error rate for doctors prescribing the wrong medicine for their patient’s ailment is ____
2) The longest anyone has ever gone without sleeping is ____
3) In the USA, the chances your doctor is a fake are ____

Robert Chow won the contest "how many Q-Tips are in the jar" game. Robert is pictured on the left and Juan is second to the left. Right of them are pictures of our open house.

- December 9-10, 2009

- Ops A La Carte teams up with Voler Systems (a design engineering firm) and SigmaQuest (a quality database solutions provider) to co-exhibt at the BIOMEDevice Expo. Walt Maclay, CEO of Voler, also gave a presentation on Data Acquisition for Medical Devices, as part of the Innovation Briefs portion of the conference. Also attending the booth and meeting customers were Ops A La Carte's managing partner Mike Silverman as well as SigmaQuest's CEO Nader Fathi.

Also congratulations to Paul Russell of Life Technologies for winning our drawing - an RC Solar Car.

Pictured below to the left are Walt and Mike in front of their booth.To the right, Walt and Mike are congratulation Paul for winning.

- November 19, 2009

MEPTEC Semiconductor to Solar Symposium", San Jose

We exhibited at the event and presented the following paper

"Reliability Challenges for Solar Photovoltaics and Opportunities for Semiconductors"

The talk can be found on the technical download section of our website at SolarReliabilityPresentation.

Also, congratulations to the winner of our Solar-Powered RC Car, Jim Huang of Hong Kong Science Park. See pictures of the Solar Symposium. This is quite appropriate because Managing Partner Mike Silverman will be in Hong Kong next month on his way to Shenzhen China. As a result of the two meeting at the Solar Symposium, Mike will be visiting the HKSP on his trip to discuss business relations between the two companies.

- November 15, 2009

Ops adds a new consultant to our company:

Peter Arrowhart (Eastern Canada - Toronto) has over 20 years industry experience in magnetic disk drive manufacturing, electronics and optoelectronics packaging and assembly, in the areas of materials analysis, process development, technical problem solving, reliability and quality improvement. See the Ops Team for more details.

- November 13, 2009
Ops celebrates writing its 2000th proposal. Even though we officially became a company in January 2001, we started numbering our proposals in May, 2004 and since that time, we have written 2000 proposals. That is an average of one proposal every day for 5 1/2 years (including weekends). And our success rate in receiving orders for written proposals remains one of the highest in the consulting industry - over 50.

See the attached pictures of our2000 Proposals Party.

- November 7, 2009
Thank you for those who joined us for our webinar on November 6th introducing our revolutionary "HALT to AFR Calculator". We have developed a model in which we can calculate the actual field failure rate of a product solely based on the results of HALT (and very accurately I should add). Over 300 people signed up for this webinar and we have had lots of follow on interest and inquries. If you missed it or want to show to a friend or colleague, go to Tech Papers for the video download or the pdf slide download (all the rest of our tech papers are there for download as well, including the Solar Reliability presentation we gave at last week's Semiconductor to Solar Symposium in San Jose).

- October 28, 2009

Advanced TCA Show, San Jose

We exhibited at the event and presented the following paper

"New Fast Method for Determining Product MTBF"

The talk can be found on the technical download section of our website at Technical Papers.

- October 24, 2009

ASQ Quality Conference "Road to Excellence: Best Practice Trails", San Jose

We exhibited at the event and presented the following paper

"Estimating Field Failure Rate From the Results of HALT"

The talk can be found on the technical download section of our website at Technical Papers.

Also, congratulations to the winner of our RC Helicopter, Lily Tso of JDSU. See pictures of the ASQ Conference

- October 8, 2009
SJ Business Journal announces Ops A La Carte as one of the 70 fastest growing private company in the Bay Area. Each year, the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal comes out with a list of the fastest growing private companies in Silicon Valley, and this year, Ops A La Carte has made the list. On October 8th, they held a banquet and announced that we placed 60th on the list. For more details, go to SJ Business Journal's Fast 70 List.

- October 7-9, 2009

Accelerated Stress Testing and Reliability Workshop, New Jersey

We exhibited at the event and presented the following papers and tutorials

"How to Design a Better Test Program"
"Green Reliability"
"Estimating Field Failure Rate From the Results of HALT"

All three talks can be found on the technical download section of our website at Technical Papers.

Also, congratulations to the drawing winner, Ablel Fessehaye of SoHaR. See pictures of the ASTR Conf.

- October 2, 2009

Hunter Technology OktoberTechFest - Ops gave a presentation on "Design for Reliability - an Overview"

This talk can be found on the technical download section of our website at Technical Papers.

- September 30, 2009

Green Reliability Talk, IEEE Reliability Society at HP Oaks Room Cupertino , California . 

We presented a paper on “Green Reliability - Where Do We Start?”

This talk can be found on the technical download section of our website at Technical Papers.

- September 15, 2009

SJ Business Journal announces Ops A La Carte made it to this year's Fast 50 list again, making us one of the fastest growing private company in the Bay Area. Each year, the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal comes out with a list of the 50 fastest growing private companies in Silicon Valley, and this year, Ops A La Carte has made the list. On October 8th, they will hold a banquet and announce which position on the list we obtained.

- September 13, 2009

Ops' Annual Consultants Pool Party . Each year, we host a pool party for all of our consultants and consulting partners to help say thank you as well as to increase the strength of our consulting network. This year was the biggest ever with over 80 guests attending. Please go to Ops Pool Party for a few pictures of the event.

- September 1, 2009

Ops releases 4 new industry-targeted brochures, including

Clean Tech/Green Industries

Medical/Biomed

Military/Aerospace

Oil and Gas

We have been working in each of these industries for years and we have decided to dedicate extra resources in growing each of these vertical markets. We have added new services to each and have been presenting papers at various conferences in each specific industry, including the CMSE event in February 2009 in San Diego where we presented a paper on "Evaluating and Overcoming the risks of moving to Lead Free", the medical symposium MEDTEC in September, 2009 in Phoenix where we will be presenting a paper on "How to Develop a Better Reliability Test Plan", the ASTR Workship in October, 2009 where we will be presenting a paper on "Green Reliability", and we participated in British Petroleum's Quality Conference.

- August 28, 2009

Ops expands its business India by adding an office in Bangalore, to go along with our established office in Delhi. This will allow us to capitalize on the expanding high tech sector in Southern India. It will also allow us to be more competitive with pricing in the US by using resources from our overseas offices with their attractive labor rates.

To find out more about these offices, plase visit our Bangalore web page.

- August 25, 2009

Ops starts our 11th annual Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE) certification course. Attendance for the course was the best in 3 years, indicating a possible shift in emphasis back to the fundamentals.

Becoming certified as a Reliability Engineer can be valuable to your employer and your career. The certification is being offered through ASQ and IEEE jointly. Ops has offered the Exam Preparation Course for 11 years running. Students have found it very valuable in preparing for the exam. The success rate in passing is several times higher for students that have taken the course compared to those that have not! Even if you are not planning on taking the exam but need a good, in-depth course in reliability, this can benefit you substantially.

To find out more about the course or to sign up for the next offering in January 2010, please visit our CRE Course Page or email us at our contact form

- August 14, 2009

Ops Issues the following press release:

"NeoVista has been granted CE Mark approval for the VIDION ANV Therapy System! Ops A La Carte was a key contributor to the success of this project, helping in the area of reliability and statistics in developing life tests to prove the longevity of the product.

Ops A La Carte is the leader in reliability and quality solutions for the medical industry.

Ops provides the Medical Industry with Mission Critical Values:

Committed to High-Reliable Systems to save human lives

Successfully analyze and test critical medical products with confidence

Deliver accuracy and precision to extend product life for each application

Deliver customized solutions & consultancy to address program risks

In addition to medical products, Ops A La Carte has reliability expertise in Clean Energy, Military, Oil and Gas, Telecom, and many other industries.

Ops A La Carte is a Professional Reliability Engineering firm focused on providing companies confidence in reliability throughout your product life cycle. They offer a flexible method of engagement from end-to-end reliability solutions to solving specific problems to providing individual targeted reliability services. They do this through reliability assessment, consultation, testing, and training. They have our own Reliability Lab called HALT and HASS Labs where they have successfully helped customers improve the reliability on over 500 different products in over 90 different industries. So whether you are having field failures or developing your next product and cannot take any chances on reliability, they will develop a reliability solution that is right for every customer."

- July 15, 2009

Ops adds two new consultant to our company:

Lou LaVallee (Eastern US - Rochester, NY) has over 20 years of experience. Prior to joining Ops A La Carte Lou worked at Xerox as a Quality/Reliability/Maintainability/Cost engineer for the Printing Systems Group.

Anirban Roy (Southern India - Bangalore) got his bachelor's degree in EE from Burdwan University and his master's degree in Reliability Engineering from IIT Kharagpur. He has worked at HCL and Goodrich Aerospace, including an assignment in Germnay on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

- July 5, 2009

Ops publishes our Government Capabilities Statement, including our Cage Code (5H0D6) and our NAICS Codes (541690, 541380, 541990) and our SIC Codes (8711, 8734, 8742). "We have performed a number of government/military projects in the past, and now we are ready to start taking on larger projects" says Managing Partner Mike Silverman.

- June 25, 2009

Ops wins best paper award at annual Applied Reliability Symposium. Ops' Managing Partner Mike Silverman won 3rd place for his presentation on "How to Develop a Better Reliability Test Plan". The award was a $500 cash prize. See article for more details at http://www.arsymposium.org/2009/ars2009_awards.htm.

In addition, Ops gave away a drawing at the ARS - a free RC Helicopter. Picture1, Picture2

- June 3, 2009

Ops A La Carte exhibited at the Military and Aerospace Forum in San Diego. We highlighted our new military program to over 800 attendees. Click here to see our new Military and Aerospace page.

- May 26, 2009

National Semiconductor released a press release highlighted the work that Ops A La Carte performed for them on their new Solar Magic product. Here is the press release:

"In addition to rigorous internal testing, Santa Clara, Calif.- based Ops a La Carte LLC provided reliability testing of National's SolarMagic power optimizer at its HALT and HASS Labs in Santa Clara. Ops a La Carte has had a long-term presence in the reliability field, conducting extensive reliability testing for the aerospace, automotive, medical, telecom, defense and energy (including fuel cell, oil and solar) industries."

Click here to download the entire press release or go to the yahoo web version yahoo finance)

- May 15, 2009

We have added one new consultant to our company:

Art Degenholtz (Eastern US - New Jersey) has over 45 years of experience. Prior to joining Ops A La Carte Art was a consultant at Curtiss-Wright Controls in the areas of Reliability, Maintainability and Safety.

- May 8, 2009

Ops A La Carte, IEEE Reliability Society and ASQ teamed up and put on a seminar on Green Reliability. Over 75 people attended live and over 125 people attended via webinar. Go to Green Reliability for more details on the event and services we offer in this area.

- April 10, 2009

We held our 3rd annual Reliability Symposium in San Jose California. We opened it up for webconference participants. Over half the attendees were via webconference. That gave us a strong indication that people are still interested in training but limited travel budgets have required more on-line training.

See pictures of our symposium at: 2009 Reliability Symposium

- Mar 20, 2009

Between our existing customers plus a few new large projects in both HALT and HASS, our HALT and HASS Labs group was very busy through spring and see it continuing through the summer. We just added several new Solar, Medical, and Defense companies to our list of customers. See our page HALT and HASS Labs for more details.

- Mar 1, 2009

We have completed and released our HALT Calculator for public use. It can be used to calculate MTBF from HALT and Field Data. The model was created by a distinguished member of the reliability community, Harry McLean and is being offered exclusively through Ops A La Carte.

How many of us have wanted to use the HALT data to estimate Annualized Failure Rate (AFR)? The common response is that "it cannot be done." In fact, it is possible but what you need is a good model and good data to back the model. This is exactly what Harry did. See the following write-up HALT Calculator for more information on the calculator and how to use.

Previous attempts by individuals to derive a model were unsuccessful because the approach was to determine an acceleration factor for HALT using a physics-of-failure approach, and that is impossible to do accurately because the time at each stress is too short and it is difficult to account for all of the interactions. Instead, we approached it as a model based on data. Given enough data, just about anything can be modeled, and with our wealth of HALT experience, obtaining the data was not a problem.

We will run calculations for customers at a cost of $500 per calculation. Or for customers that perform HALT and a Reliability Prediction with our company, we are offering the calculation for free.

Note that the calculator is a model based on data, and with all data-driven models, the more data, the better. We will continue to collect data and enhance the model over time.

Harry presented this calculator at the annual ASTR Conference. Download a copy at TechPapers.

- Feb 28, 2009

We have released our new Blog dedicated to the topic of Reliability. You can find it at Reliability-Blog. Already various articles have been posted. Check back frequently to find your favorite subjects. All blog articles can be viewed without registering. If you would like to respond to any blog article or would like notification sent to you when new blog topics have been posted, then you will need to fill out a quick registration form.

- Feb 15, 2009

We have added five new consultants to our company in several different regions of the US:

Rich Fries (Central US - Wisconsin) has over 35 years experience in hardware and software reliability, software development, regulatory compliance, and device design.

Gary Howell (Northwest US - Washington) has over 30 years experience in system modeling and analysis, risk management, threat analysis, probabilistic design, reliability, availability and maintainability modeling and analysis, safety analysis, accelerated life testing and accelerated stress screening.

Greg Larsen (Central US - Colorado) has over 30 years experience applying statistical methods to solve problems and has made significant contributions in measurement system analysis (MSA) and inventory modeling to better manage supply chains.

Ron Purcell (Northern California - Bay Area) has an extensive background in electronic design engineering and business, with special focus in Analog / RF design analysis, design-for-reliability, stress testing and failure analysis.

David Tu (Northern California - Bay Area) has 20 years experience in reliability testing and regulatory compliance, both startup and established companies in the Medical Device, Telecom, Internet network and Consumer electronics industries.

- Feb 10, 2009

Ops A La Carte presented a paper at the annual Components for Military and Space Electronics (CMSE) entitled: "How to Develop a Qualification Test Plan for RoHS Products" by Mike Silverman of OPS A La Carte and Dr. Hillman of DfR Solutions.

- Feb 1, 2009

Ops A La Carte presented, exhibited, and helped manage the 55th annual Reliability Availability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS) Cliff Lange gave one of the tutorials, Harold Hart moderated one of the sessions and Fred Schenkelberg was again on the management committee along with Cliff. We had four other consultants in attendance - Rich Fries, John Hansen, Lennox Bennett, and John Cooper. Congratulations to Jerome Anderson of General Dynamics for winning our grand prize drawing, a lovely Valentine's gift basket.

- Dec 1, 2008

We have added new 7 consultants to our company in several different regions of the US:

Allen Adolph (Northern California) has over 30 years experience at both early stage high technology start-up venture firms and publicly traded high volume consumer product companies. He has over 20 years of manufacturing "outsourcing" experience, utilizing both local and offshore CMs/ODMs (China, Mexico, Taiwan, and India).

John Cooper (Northern California) has 20 years experience in high tech reliability, testing and management, in startup companies and companies such as Agilent, Plantronics, Terawave, and Leapfrog. He has managed various reliability and test groups, as well as manufacturing groups.

Michael Gozzo (Northern California) has over 30 years experience counseling and educating at all levels of management in the areas of Supply Chain, Lean Manufacturing, Demand Flow Technology, Just-In-Time, Total Quality Control, Manufacturing Systems Implementation, Inventory Control and Production/Operations Management.

Bill Holt (Northern California) has over 20 years experience in reliability engineering & management. Topics addressed during that tenure range from atomic-level device elements to very large networks, primarily in the high-tech industry.

Jay Pisharodi (Northern California) has over 20 years of experience in the electronics industry, and has extensive experience with various stages in the product life cycle.

Bob Bowman (Northwest US) has over 30 years experience in reliability engineering consulting and education to companies in the computer, semiconductor, networking, aerospace, and other high tech industries

Mark Van Veen (Southwest US) has 30 years of technical and management experience in reliability, mechanical design, design analysis and systems engineering in new product and R/D environments.

More information about each consultant can be found on our website at About_Team.

We now have 42 consultants across the US and in 4 countries outside the US. To get a better understanding of their location, the attached link shows where they are in the world About_Clients_Map. We also provided a map of where our customers are in relation to the consultants. In addition have also updated our About_Clients page and added a number of new industries we have worked in, for a total of 67 different industries.

- Nov 20, 2008

Ops A La Carte announces a new service, called EXPERT REVIEW. This service especially designed at companies that need someone to review a plan or report and give expert guidance only.

We have many different types of customers - those that are short on manpower and need our help to fill in as well as those that have the manpower but lack a specific area of specialty. However, this new service is targeted at a 3rd type of customer - those that have the manpower and the specific area of specialty, but need one of our engineers to review their work before it goes on to senior management or out to a customer. Having OPS certify a plan or report will provide three main benefits to companies:

1) it will save the company a lot of time and money by quickly assuring the company they are on the right track, or providing minor re-direction to get them back on track.

2) it will provide an extra level of credibility. All our reviewers are CRE certified and when they sign off on a document, it will carry extra meaning to the reader.

3) it will provide a certification that is a permanent record for your design history file.

Contracts can be set up on a per review basis, or on a monthly basis. Ask us about our monthly pricing discount.

Also, as part of this service, we offer language translation, both written and verbal. Often the confusion lies in communication between customer and client and we have consultants fluent in many different languages - Mandarin, Hindi, Korean, Spanish, French, Irish, Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian and many more.

Email us at via our contact form for more information on this new service.

- Nov 18, 2008

OPS Bryan Stallard and Mike Silverman wrote an article on "Using EDA Tools Throughout Product Life-Cycles" and got published in the quarterly RMS Newsletter. This is a follow up to the presentation that Bryan, Mike, and JW Smith gave at CMSE in Feb, 2008. Also, feel free to download copies at TechPapers.

- Nov 17, 2008

HALT and HASS Labs Adds 3rd HALT Chamber - a small 1 foot x 1 foot chamber. And we are pricing this new chamber very attractively.

- Nov 13, 2008

OPS gave a presentation at the Product Realization Network Lunch and Learn entitled "Quality Risks in Outsourcing", a look at some of the risks involved when you outsource your design and manufacturing, and some of the methods you can employ to reduce these risks. Feel free to download copies at TechPapers.

- Nov 12, 2008

OPS gave a presentation at the International Test and Inspection Conference on: "New Techniques for More Effective ESS". Feel free to download copies at TechPapers.

Congratulations to Arthur Pashos of Segway for winning our grand prize drawing, a lovely Autumn gift basket.

- Nov 10, 2008

Ops A La Carte's Asian trip a big success. We were in Singapore and China from October 22 through November 7.

October 22-23 - Singapore Applied Reliability Symposium. We presented a paper on "Trapped by MTBF". Congratulations to Noor Hamizhi for winning the drawing for a new IPOD nano.

October 24 - Singapore private seminar at ST Engineering. We presented on "Developing a Better Reliability Test Program"

October 27-31 - Shanghai, China: Ops A La Carte and China partner Sinorel met with prospective partners and customers. Our two long-time US partners Nuvation Engineering and Speck Design both have offices in Shanghai, and we met with the managers at both offices and worked out how we will cooperate with them going forward in China. Here is a link to Speck China and the capabilities of their China office.

November 3-6 - Shenzhen, China: Ops A La Carte and Sinorel joined together to give two public seminars - one on Design for Reliability and one on HALT and HASS. Below are pictures of students in our two seminars.

- Oct 3, 2008

OPS exhibited and gave two presentations at the Accelerated Stress Test and Reliability Workshop in Portland Oregon October 1-3. The presentations were titled "Linking Leading Indicators with HALT and HASS" and "To ALT or Not to ALT". Feel free to download copies at TechPapers.

Congratulations to Hao Lam of Schlumberger for winning our grand prize drawing, a lovely Portland gift basket.

- Sep 17, 2008

Ops A La Carte/HALT and HASS Labs held its annual Open House on Sept 17. In celebration of the Olympics just ending, baseball coming to a close, and football just starting, the theme for our open house was Sports! and we sure had a lot of fun. Click on the link Open House to view pictures of the event. Also, congratulations to Stuart Chessen of Savi for winning our grand prize give-away "Win a Wii for peanuts" - a new Wii Entertainment System. Stuart was the closest guess for how many peanuts in the jar. The correct answer was 1704. Below is a picture of a few Open House scenes along with Stuart with his new Wii (and his peanuts).

In addition to the fun, we had a lot of educational information in the form of Poster Sessions on the following topics:

Software Reliability with George de la Fuente of OPS

Warranty Cost Reduction Methodology with Bob Mueller of OPS

Design for Six Sigma with Greg Swartz of OPS

Semiconductor Reliability with George Denes of OPS

Secrets for Medical Packaging with David Thysen of OPS

HASS Fixturing Techniques with Mike Abdella from Adaptive Innovations

Using Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Tools for Parts Obsolescence with Bryan Stallard of OPS

- Sept 8, 2008

Ops A La Carte's Managing Partner Mike Silverman will be in Asia from October 22 through November 7. If you have any team members, customers, or vendors that may be interested in having us stop by, please pass this information on. We would be happy to discuss any areas of reliability or provide in-house training or consulting. If interested, please email us at Asia Visit. The schedule will be as follows:

October 22-24 - Singapore

October 27-31 - Taiwan

November 3-7 - China

And while in China, we already have two public seminars scheduled in Shenzhen. November 3-4 will be on DfR and November 5-6 will be on HALT and HASS. Please email us at China Reliability Classes if you would like more details.

- Sept 1, 2008

We have added 4 new consultants to our company in several different regions of the US:

Steve Brenner (Northern California) has been working in the field of environmental simulation and reliability testing for over 30 years. Beginning in the late sixties with reliability and design verification testing on the Lunar Module, the Space Shuttle in the eighties, to semiconductor manufacturing equipment in the nineties, Steve has always been involved with the latest techniques for verifying equipment integrity through testing.

Stephen King (Northwest US) has over 20 years of quality and reliability engineering, root cause failure analysis and management experience. He has worked on many different types of products from hand-held and portable devices to large-scale networked systems. He is proficient in reliability assessment and advanced statistical analysis. Stephen has developed systems for assessing and monitoring the reliability of fielded products to identify reliability improvement and cost reduction opportunities.

Rian Leichter (Northern California) has over 40 years of experience in reliability and product development. He provides services in the areas of product development engineering, product documentation, reliability and maintainability analysis, integrated logistics support, quality engineering services, product qualification testing and documentation and pilot manufacturing support. He has consulted in the computer, networking, and military communications industries.

Dev Raheja (East Coast) is a new product engineering consultant since in 1981, dedicated to the Design Assurance Technologies. His range of consulting encompasses automotive, high tech industry, aerospace, defense systems, medical systems, and consumer products.

More information about each consultant can be found on our website at About_Team.

- July 23, 2008

Over 500 attendees for Ops A La Carte's webinar on Root Cause Analysis. Instructors Cliff Lange, PhD of Ops A La Carte, Kim Parnell, PhD of Ops A La Carte and PEC, Jim McLeish of DfR Solutions, PhD, and Al Alaverdi of SigmaQuest each gave short presentations on their areas of expertise within RCA. Please let us know if you'd like copies of these presentations by emailing us at RCA Webinar Slides or you can download at TechPapers.

We polled the audience for suggested next topics and the largest request was for the topic "Green Reliability". If you have a topic you would like to see presented, please respond to us at webinar suggestion form. Stay tuned for more webinar announcements.

- June 17-20, 2008

Ops A La Carte gave a joint presentation at the annual Applied Reliability Symposium called "Practical Software Failure Analysis". You can view this presentation as well as others from past seminars and shows at TechPapers. Also, we exhibited at this symposium. Congratulations to Ramu Ramamurthy of Eaton Aerospace for winning our grand prize give-away - a Garmin GPS.

Below is a picture of our team at the show.

- June 8, 2008

Our HALT and HASS Labs just celebrated its 14th Anniversary in May, making it one of the oldest and most experienced reliability labs in the world. OPS Managing Partner started the lab in May 1995 when he was working with Qualmark and then in 2006 he purchased the lab from Qualmark to make it a division of Ops A La Carte.

- June 6, 2008

Ops A La Carte signs agreement with SinoRel of China to create joint consulting partnership. Ops A La Carte is based in Saratoga, California and SinoRel is based in Beijing China. Both companies have consultants in their local area. SinoRel has many China-based companies in need of expert consulting services, and OPS has many US customers with subsidiaries and contract manufacturers in China that need consulting expertise. We plan to use SinoRel's local consultants for much of the day-to-day consulting and Ops A La Carte's U.S. consultants to set the direction of the projects as well as to offer high end project management and training expertise.

- May 25, 2008

Ops A La Carte and Singapore Test Services Pte Ltd (or STS) sign a joint partnership agreement. STS is based in Singapore and OPS A La Carte is based in Northern California several offices across the U.S. along with offices in Singapore, China, India, and the U.K. The two companies have signed a joint partnership agreement to serve the reliability program and testing needs of the industry. This partnership leverages OPS' expertise in reliability program development and implementation and STS' strong test capability and experience with a wide range of reliability test facilities. This solid partnership aims to make both companies leaders in the Electronics, Infocom, Medical, and Automotive Industries within the region. "This really strengthens our ability to serve customers in the local Singapore market", says Managing Partner Mike Silverman. "We can use this to serve both local companies as well as U.S. customers with subsidiaries in Singapore. We now have three great lab partnerships (the other two being LabOne and iNeTest) as well as alliances with ReliaSoft Singapore and HALT and HASS NZ."

- May 15, 2008

We have added 7 new consultants to our company in several different regions of the US and in China:

Harvey Altstadter (Arizona): Harvey utilizes his more than 40 years of experience to provide clients with services that include Root Cause Analysis, Reliability Prediction, Stress Analysis, Worst Case Circuit Analysis, Data Analysis, Trend Analysis, Process and Procedure development for manufacture of Hybrid Microelectronic products, Screening Procedures, Training and Customer Interface for Engineering, Reliability and Failure Analysis functions.

Lennox Bennett (Southeast US) has more than ten years of experience leading reliability, quality and manufacturing in electronics, medical device, appliance, printing and manufacturing industry. He has experience in disciplines such as manufacturing engineering, advance quality engineering, reliability engineering, teaching and supervisory management. He has successfully improved process and product performances during previous assignments. He is president of Lebentech in Florida. Lennox has worked with many small and large companies, including Xerox, Maytag, Real-Time Labs, Sunbeam, GE Appliances, Motorola, Alcon Labs, and Taco Metals. He has an M.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from California Polytechnic State University.

Chet Haibel (Northwest US) has been in New Product Development all his professional life. His first 18 years were spent learning by doing as an R&D Engineer, Project Leader, and Program Manager on a wide variety of products. Chet has Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Master of Engineering degrees, both from Cornell University. He is a senior member of the American Society for Quality and is certified by ASQ as a Reliability Engineer, Quality Manager, Quality Engineer, Software Quality Engineer, Quality Auditor, and Biomedical Auditor. Chet is certified by Johnson and Johnson as a Six Sigma Green Belt.

Jeff Jin (China) holds an M.S from ZheJiang University. Mr. Jin's experience includes Measure System Analysis (MSA), Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Design of Experiments (DOE), Statistical Process Control (SPC), Highly Accelerated Life Testing/Highly Accelerated Stress Screening (HALT/HASS), Accelerated Life Testing (ALT), Reliability Demonstration Testing (RDT), and Root Cause Analysis (RCA) including the 8D methodology. He is a Six Sigma Black Belt and a Certified Reliability Engineer.

Cliff Lange (Northern California) has 30 years of industry experience in both reliability engineering and root cause failure analysis. Most recently Dr. Lange spent 12 years developing reliability programs for the Semiconductor Equipment Manufacturing industry. He is proficient in reliability assessment, reliability training and all aspects of design for reliability techniques as applied to the entire life cycle of product development.

Aron Rolnitzky (Central US) is an ASQ Certified Reliability Engineer with over 35 years of industry experience in design, reliability and quality assurance and management in the computer and medical electronics industry. He has consulted or provided training for companies in product areas including communication, medical, computers, large and small industrial, and military. Expertise includes reliability design analysis, field data analysis and corrective action systems, reliability testing including accelerated tests, reliability and quality improvement, and training.

We also added a new lab supervisor to our HALT and HASS Labs. Please welcome Jon Ferguson to our staff. Jon has over 25 years of electronics experience, with 14 in HALT and HASS at various companies such as Apple, Tyco, Harmonic, and Quantum/Maxtor.

More information about each consultant can be found on our website at About_Team.

- May 7, 2008

Ops A La Carte expands its Southwest US Office

Although Ops A La Carte is headquartered in Northern California, we haven't lost site of the growing business in the Southwest - LA, San Diego, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada. These areas are booming with activity and we are poised to make a significant impact in these regions with the team we now have in place.

The Southwest team is head up by Sales Manager Clayton Bonn. Clayton has almost 30 years experience as a sales engineer.

And our consulting team consists of Alex Fashandi (San Diego), Gil Bastien (LA), and Harvey Alstatder (Arizona). More information about each consultant can be found on our website at About_Team.

In addition to our HALT and HASS Lab in Silicon Valley, we have affiliations with some of the best test labs in the area - SoCal Testing, Wyle Labs, SGS, and NTS - for a wide variety of environmental testing, and Quality Testing Services for specific HALT and HASS test requirements. These labs complement our offerings in the bay area, and our consultants in Southern California work closely with them to assure the results are integrated with our overall solutions.

- May 1, 2008

Ops A La Carte exhibited at the Del Mar Electronics (DMES) show and gave a presentation on HALT vs. ALT: When to Use Which Technique. Please go to HALT vs. ALT for a free copy.

- April 14, 2008

The 2nd annual OPS A La Carte Reliability Symposium in Campbell and Santa Clara, CA - a notable success - took place the week of April 7 -11, 2008. The Symposium featured seven, one and two day seminars focused on the application and practices of reliability engineering. Topics included: Best Accelerated Reliability Test Methods, Design for Reliability, Design of Experiments, Mechanical Reliability, Root Cause Analysis, Software Reliability, and Statistical Process Control. See our seminar list for more details on each seminar. And we used five of our top instructors for the event, plus two distinguished guests including Dr. Michael Pecht from the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE). Dr. Pecht gave an overview on his work in Electronic Prognostics.

Over 75 attendees from a wide variety of industries attended during the course of the week. Represented were companies from the following industries: Audio/Video, Automotive, Avionics, Computers, Contract Manufacturers, Defense, Handheld/PDA Devices, Medical, Oil Exploration, Semiconductor, Semiconductor Equipment, Space, and Telecom. We also had 6 different countries represented - Belgium, Canada, China, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States.

"The annual Reliability Symposium provides not only valuable training and real-world applications to our attendees, it is also an opportunity to discuss and exchange information on the depth and breadth of the most up-to-date reliability methods," said Mike Silverman, Ops A La Carte principal and partner. "We are looking at plans to increase our training portfolio and seminar offerings to better equip our customers with state-of-the-art reliability tools and methods."

The symposium also included a tour and demonstrations of the HALT and HASS Lab in Santa Clara, a division of Ops A La Carte.

- March 14, 2008

Ops A La Carte and SigmaQuest teamed up for their 2nd combined webinar. This one was entitled "Managing Outsourcing Quality Risks". Please go to Managing Oursourcing Risks for a free download or go to Managing Outsourcing Risks Video Broadcast for a live video broadcast.

AND

- March 13, 2008

Ops A La Carte joined a panel of three to discuss "Three Views on Consultant Marketing." Ops A La Carte represented the vantage point of the entrepreneur - "It just takes hard work. Get your name out there again and again by networking, advertising, partnering, and constantly promoting your company. "Please go to Three Views on Consultant Marketing for a free copy.

- February 28, 2008
Ops brings on a new consultant in the Bay Area. Please welcome Murray Shubaly. Murray has extensive experience with large systems and in creating and managing reliability programs. We are excited to have Murray join our team. You can read more about Murray in the AboutUs/OurTeam section of our website.

- February 25, 2008
HALT/HASS Lab Getting Leading Indicator Work. After filing for our patent last fall, we have landed several large Accelerated Life Test projects, and we are using our new Leading Indicators methods. This methodology is helping us accelerate the testing even more by testing to an indication of change in performance rather than to failure, and with this, we can extrapolate to determine the end of life much before a failure occurs. You can read more about this process in the presentation we gave at the IEEE Accelerated Stress Test and Reliability Workshop. Download

- February 20, 2008
Ops brings on 2 new consultants in Southern California. With the increasing demand for reliability consulting in Southern California, we have added a consultant in the region. Please welcome Alex Fashandi, previously of Delta Design. Alex will be working out of San Diego. Also, Gil Bastien has returned to consulting and is back on our team. Gil works out of Los Angeles. Both Alex and Gil will be servicing all of our clients in Southern California. You can read more about each consultant in the AboutUs/OurTeam section of our website. For any requests in the Southern California area, please contact Clayton Bonn, our regional sales manager for Southern California. Clayton can be reached via our contact form or 714-903-1005.

- February 15, 2008
Ops A La Carte opens a new consulting center in New Delhi. "We are proud to announce the opening of our newest consulting center in New Delhi, India" says Managing Partner Mike Silverman. "This is now our third consulting center, the other two being California and Singapore. Our New Delhi facility is structured to service the entire Indian market, including Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Bombay, Delhi, and all of the other high tech areas. And we shall be offering all of the same great services and seminars out of this consulting center that we have been offering at the other two." See the About Us/New Delhi section of our website for more details. Please contact us if you are located in India or have a subsidiary in India that may need any reliability consulting services or reliability training.

- February 8, 2008
Ops A La Carte creates partnership with three UK consultants to form Ops UK. Bob Page, Martin Shaw, and Niall MacLoughlin all lead successful consulting practices in the UK, so we have chosen to team up with them to expand our offerings into Europe. See the About Us/UK section of our website for more details. Please contact us if you are located in Europe or have a subsidiary in Europe that may need any reliability consulting services or reliability training.

- February 1, 2008
Ops A La Carte announces new Semiconductor Reliability services. Leading these services are our new consultants George Denes and JW Smith. Both have a wide range of semiconductor design and reliability experience. See our new services page ICReliability for more details on the services these two will be performing.

- January 31, 2008
Ops A La Carte successfully completes three back to back shows - RAMS, DesignCon, and CMSE. See last quarter's newsletter for details on each of these events. Below is a picture of the Ops A La Carte team in front of our booth giving away our grand prize Las Vegas gift basket to the lucky winner (pictured in center). All papers and presentations are now loaded on our website at TechPapers.

- January 15, 2008
Ops A La Carte Singapore continues to grow. Our Singapore and Taiwan operation continues to grow stronger with a lot of new business development in that region.

- January 7, 2008
Ops A La Carte in talks with rep firm in China. "We are looking to expand our operations in Asia by opening an office in China. We are in talks with a rep firm in China and hope to have an office up and running by Q208" says Managing Partner Mike Silverman.

- Nov 30, 2007
Ops A La Carte gets paper accepted to CMSE Conference. Ops A La Carte shall be presenting a paper entitled: "Timely Resolution to Parts Obsolescence and Substitutions using EDA" by Bryan Stallard, JW Smith, and Mike Silverman. It is very fitting for this conference due to the increasing obsolescence issue in the military world. We have devised a way to use Electronic Design Analysis to quickly determine if the parts proposed for substitution will work in the existing circuitry. Of course, the product will need to be re-qualified, but EDA is a much quicker and less expensive approach that can be used as a first step in the qualification, and can also be used to disqualify a proposed part. See the events section of this Newsletter for more details.

- Nov, 2007
HALT and HASS Shows No Slowdown. As the holiday season approaches, we normally experience a slowdown in the test lab side of the business, but this year has been exceptionally busy. We are booked out through the end of the year and customers are even starting to schedule into January. "First we had a busy summer and now a busy holiday season. This is a good sign that the economy in Silicon Valley continues to stay hot" says Managing Partner Mike Silverman. "Most of our work at the lab comes from development groups, and if there are a lot of products being developed, that sends a real positive note to the health of the economy." Ops A La Carte's other divisions - the consulting division, the contractor division, and the educational division, is also showing no sign of slowdown this holiday season.

- Nov 1-2, 2007
Ops A La Carte presents 3 papers at annual Accelerated Stress Testing and Reliability (ASTR) Workshop in Washington DC: The three presentations we gave were:

1) "Early Reliability Testing: Increasing the Effectiveness of a Reliability Program by Moving Reliability Testing Upstream", by Mike Silverman

2) "Enhancing Accelerated Life Tests with Prognostics", by Arthur Zingher

3) "HASS Profile Fine Tuning Using Field Data", by Mike Silverman

Copies of each of these are located on the Resources page of our website.

- Oct, 2007
Ops A La Carte files a patent on Leading Indicators: To resolve client problems in life test and operational maintenance, Ops A La Carte files a patent application on Leading Indicator Methods for Accelerated Life Testing. Companies struggle with real-world challenges and constraints on life test and operational maintenance, as we have seen during our years of Reliability Engineering services for our clients. To resolve this, we invented a practical and more effective method for Accelerated Life Testing, and filed a patent application in October 2007. This introduces Leading Indicators Methods that resolve common challenges and constraints.

To strengthen your engineering and your product, Ops can thus provide you with engineering leadership skills and services. For more details, see the Featured Service section for more details.

- September, 2007
Asian Tour a Huge Hit: In September, we gave seminars on Design for Reliability in both Taiwan and Singapore, and they were a huge success. Working with our local partners SGS and Rel Pro in Asia, we did a 2 week tour, consisting of both seminars and customer visits. This is really strengthening our position in Asia and proving the consulting model in the area. Next year, we shall be giving similar courses in China as well.

Sep 10, 2007
New Partner's Page Added to Website. We just updated our new partner's page to our website with many new partners and more information listed on existing partners.

Our customers come first and we will do everything we can to provide a full service solution to them. And rather than trying to become experts in every field, we recognize where there are already industry experts and we partner with them when the need arises.

Next to each link, we have listed our relationship with the company and how we partner with them. Go to Partners for more info.

- Sep 1, 2007
Singapore Workshop Set for October 18th. Ops A La Carte is partnering with SGS Singapore and RelPRO Consulting of Singapore to offer a 1/2 day seminar on Reliability. This seminar is being coordinated through the Singapore Manufacturers' Federation. In addition to this, we shall be participating in the Applied Reliability Symposium Asia on October 25-26. Please use our contact form to email us for more information.

- Aug 23, 2007
In July, Ops A La Carte reached a milestone: Its 1000th client proposal, a goal reached in just over three years. This is a remarkable achievement for such a young company, and Ops A La Carte wishes to thank their clients for bringing us such success.

- Aug 15, 2007
HALT and HASS Labs Booming through the Summer. The normally slow summer months certainly hasn't hit our lab business this year. Our test lab HALT and HASS Labs kept a steady flow of business for most of 2007 and continues to remain busy through the summer. "This is a good sign that the economy in Silicon Valley is really picking up," says Managing Partner Mike Silverman. "Most of our work at the lab comes from development groups, and if there are a lot of products being developed, that sends a real positive note to the health of the economy." Ops A La Carte's other divisions - the consulting division, the contractor division, and the educational division, also showed health growth through the summer and throughout 2007.

- July 1, 2007
Applied Reliability Symposium San Diego was a big success. "We go to these events to meet new consultants as much as we do to meet customers," says Managing Partner Mike Silverman. "And using this as measurement criteria, this was one of our best events ever. We met half a dozen really good consulting candidates and over 20 potential customers." Ops A La Carte has several other big events coming up throughout the rest of 2007. See the Events section of this newsletter for further details.

- June 2, 2007
Ops A La Carte starts a Reliability Contractor Division. Until today, Ops A La Carte, was strictly focused on project-based consulting. However, there is a growing need for companies that require consultants/contractors on a monthly basis rather than by project. We have just launched a new division focused on this contractor need. Please use our contact form to email us for more information.

- May 30, 2007
Ops A La Carte announces strategic partnership with SigmaQuest by co-hosting webinar series. Ops A La Carte teams up with SigmaQuest, a leading data extraction and tracking company, to provide a webinar on how to use SigmaQuest's data extraction software along with Ops A La Carte's data analysis capabilities to tackle the problem of reviewing RoHS return data to determine the reliability impact AFTER implementation. The second webinar in the series (date to be announced) will be on using field data to fine-tune a HASS profile.

- May 25, 2007
Ops A La Carte opens office in Singapore. Ops Managing Partner Mike Silverman spends a week in Singapore visiting customers and setting up consulting practice. "We see such a huge potential for consulting business in Singapore. Along with Singapore, we have already started working in Taiwan and have future plans for expanding into India."

- May 14, 2007
Ops A La Carte holds its Annual Reliability Symposium the week of May 7-11. We featured some of our most popular courses in a one week symposium. We look forward to putting it on again next year. For pictures of the event, please click on the link Symposium.

- May 1, 2007
Ops A La Carte presents at the SMTA Medical Conference. We presented our paper on HALT vs ALT on Medical Products. Click the link for a copy of the presentation. We also exhibited at the SMTA Medical Conference exhibition.

- April 12, 2007
Ops A La Carte's Open House is a big success. Thanks to those of you who came to our annual open house, it was a big success. We had over 100 people come by and celebrate our new reliability lab. And we featured three of our most popular presentations - 1) When to Use HALT vs ALT, 2) Climatic Testing and How to Write a Good Test Plan, and 3) Developing Qualification Programs for Lead-Free_Products. If you could not make it to the open house and would like to download these for free, please click on any of the links above. And feel free to give us a call for a private tour. For pictures of the event, please click on the link Open House.

- March 12, 2007
Ops A La Carte presents at the Components for Military and Space Electronics (CMSE) Conference. We presented our paper on Accelerated Testing Integrated into a Reliability Program. Click the link for a copy of the presentation. We also exhibited at the SMTA Medical Conference exhibition.

- February 28, 2007
Ops A La Carte lands major project in Singapore. As part of our effort to expand into Asia, we landed a large project with a major Singapore firm. Several other projects are currently in discussion.

- February 15, 2007
HALT and HASS Labs adds two more pieces of Reliability Test equipment to the lab. In addition to our two HALT chambers, we now have an electrodynamic shaker capable of doing two axis sine and random, and we also have a Combined Temperature/Humidity chamber. Both chambers add versatility to the types of reliability tests we can perform.

- February 1, 2007
Ops A La Carte gets a tutorial spot at the annual Components for Military and Space Electronics (CMSE) in March. This will be our first year presenting. This year, the event will be held in Los Angeles. We will also be exhibiting at this symposium and we will have free tickets to give away. See Special Offers section as well as Problem Solver section for details on how to win. Go to the following link for more details on this show CMSE Link.

- January 26, 2007
Ops A La Carte gets two papers accepted at the annual Applied Reliability Symposium in June. For the third year in a row, Ops has a paper accepted at the annual Applied Reliability Symposium. This year, the event will be held in San Diego. The two papers we will be presenting are Fred Schenkelberg's "Trapped by MTBF - A Study of Alternate Reliability Metrics" and Doug Farel's "Using Competitive Analysis to get the Competitive Advantage". We will also be exhibiting at this symposium and we will have free tickets to give away. Stay tuned for details of give-aways in our next newsletter edition.

- December 15, 2006
Ops A La Carte performs first project with its new partner Asian branch of SGS. After signing an agreement with SGS, Ops and SGS worked on their first project together in Taiwan. Since then, we have worked on several more in Taiwan, marking our entrance into the Asian market.

- Nov 15, 2006
Ops A La Carte announces their new Software Reliability services. Companies find that their software engineers spend more time debugging than designing or coding, and accurate software reliability measurements are not available at deployment to share with customers. What can development organizations do to increase software reliability without significant increases to schedules or budgets? Ops A La Carte offers software reliability training and consulting services that integrate with the above approaches to produce better results. Our training and consulting services focus directly on the practices of software and test engineers.

- Nov 1, 2006
Ops A La Carte welcomes 5 more consultants to our team. Please welcome Gil Bastien, Keya Bhattacharyya, Gerry Cohen, George de la Fuente, and Harold Hart. Gil is an expert at HALT and HASS, including fixturing. Keya is an expert at new product introductions. Gerry has expertise in both Quality and Reliability Management. George is our resident Software Reliability expert and has developed our newest services in the area of Software Reliability. George's services are featured in the 2006 Fall-Winter Newsletter Featured Article. And Harold has expertise at the reliability management level, helping to set up and develop reliability departments.,

We have also added two new Sales Managers to our team. Clayton Bonn is our new Sales Manager for the Southwest region (Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico). And Randy Bloom is our new Sales Manager for the Northwest region (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and British Columbia. Each consultants' profile is shown on our Our Team's webpage.

- Oct 4-6, 2006
Ops A La Carte consultants presented 5 papers at the annual Accelerated Stress Testing for Reliability (ASTR) Workshop held in San Francisco October 4-6. The papers and authors were:

1) HALT vs. ALT - When to Use Which Technique by Mike Silverman of OALC

2) HALT Results on RoHS Products by Mike Silverman of OALC along with Cheryl Tulkoff of National Instruments and Harry McLean of Xantrex.

3) Competitive Analysis by Doug Farel of OALC

4) Design for Warranty Cost Reduction by Bob Mueller of OALC

5) Lot Acceptance Testing: A Method for Reducing the Need for Failure Analysis by Sorin Witzman of OALC.

We also exhibited at the event - both the OALC booth as well as for our new division, HALT and HASS Labs.

Ops A La Carte is on the AST committee for deciding the location and the speakers. Next year's workshop is scheduled for October 2007 in College Park, Maryland.

- Sep 24 through Oct 2, 2006
Ops A La Carte Develops Alliance with SGS in Taiwan and delivers joint seminar

SGS Testing Services and Ops A La Carte put on a free one-day Reliability seminar in Taiwan on September 26th and in Singapore on September 29th to over 250 engineers to announce their partnership with SGS and to kick off their entrance into the Asian market.

- Sep 27, 2006
Ops A La Carte's presents a paper at the Asian National Quality (ANQ) 2006 Conference in Singapore. Ops A La Carte was the United States' sole representative at this yearly conference. We presented our paper on HALT vs. ALT: When to Use Which Technique.

- Sep 21, 2006
SJ Business Journal announces Ops A La Carte as the 9th fastest growing private company in the Bay Area. Each year, the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal comes out with a list of the 50 fastest growing private companies in Silicon Valley, and this year, Ops A La Carte has made the list. On September 21st, they held a banquet and announced that we placed 9th on the list. For more details, go to SJ Business Journal's Fast 50 List

- Aug 1, 2006
Ops A La Carte was chosen to give a paper at ANQ2006. The Asian Network of Quality (ANQ) in conjunction with the Singapore Quality Institute will hold its annual symposium in Singapore on Sept 27-29th and has invited Ops A La Carte to present a paper on Accelerated Reliability Testing techniques. For more details on the conference, please go to ANQ2006.

- July 15, 2006
Ops A La Carte and SGS Testing Services announces a joint September seminar in Taiwan. SGS Testing Services is putting on a free one-day seminar in Taiwan on Sept 26th and the featured speakers shall be Mike Silverman and Bob MacLevey of Ops A La Carte. Mike will be presenting the fundamentals of Reliability Integration and Bob will be presenting how to integrate solid Failure Analysis techniques into a reliability program. The seminar is being hosted by SGS. For a brochure on the event, please go to Taiwan Reliability Seminar.

- July 1, 2006
Ops A La Carte completes purchase of QualMark HALT Lab in Santa Clara. The Santa Clara HALT Lab was started in May, 1995 by Mike Silverman when he was an employee of QualMark. Mike ran the lab for 5 years before leaving to start Ops A La Carte in 2000. Then last year, Ops A La Carte took back over the management of the lab, and on Juhttp://www.opsalacarte.com/sp/contact.php?id=pdfs/OPS_brochures/OALC_CleanTech.pdfly 1st, we officially purchased the facility from QualMark. Please go to our revised HALT and HASS Web Pages for more details. Below is our new logo for the lab.

- May 31, 2006
Ops A La Carte releases 6th Quarterly Newsletter. The featured article for the quarter is Test Equipment Design and Fabrication. Also included is an article by BlockSim on their modeling software.

- May 29, 2006
Ops A La Carte holds 5th Annual Consultants Party. This event is to thank all of our consultants for making us as strong as we are. We now have over 20 consultants and 30 collaborative partners and labs as part of our organization. Thanks! We couldn't do it without you.

- April 15, 2006
Ops A La Carte completes exhibiting at 4th event of the year. In the first quarter of the year, we exhibited at four Symposia, Workshops, and Trade Shows: RAMS, IRPS, ISQED, and D2M.

- April 2006
Ops A La Carte welcomes 5 more consultants to our team. Please welcome Lee Cooke, Brian Flanagan, Bob MacLevey, Chris Reynolds, and Rich Willis. Lee is our expert technical writer. Brian brings a new level of experience in the area of compliance testing to round out our regulatory services. Bob is an expert in failure analysis as well as analyzing field databases for trends. He also develops custom database tools to help with this effort. Chris is our newest reliability wiz, taking on predictions, fmecas, derating analyses, thermal analyses, and HALT. And Rich is our test engineering guru with years of experience designing and fabricating custom test fixtures and test equipment. Rich's service is featured in this month's newsletter article. Each consultants' profile is shown on our Our Team's webpage.

- Feb, 2006
Ops A La Carte has been invited to present at the annual IRPS Conference on March 28th. We shall present at one of the workshop sessions at the annual International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS) on March 28th from 7:30pm-9:30pm. We shall be presenting two topics - 1) RoHS and its effects on IC Manufacturers and 2) Lot Acceptance Testing for Complex IC's. The conference will be at the McEnery Convention Center March 26-30. For more details, please go to http://www.irps.org.

- Feb, 2006
Ops A La Carte has been invited to give a presentation on RoHS at the Design for Manufacturability (D2M) conference. This conference is part of the larger Embedded Systems Conference being held at the McEnery Convention Hall in San Jose on April 5th. Our presentation will be on reliability issues and status of Pb-free manufacturing.

- Feb, 2006
Ops A La Carte has been invited to give a presentation at the Applied Reliability Symposium (ARS), in Orlando, FL on June 14-16th. Our presentation will be on Lot Acceptance Testing for Complex IC's. We shall be exhibiting at this symposium as well so please come by our booth.

- Feb, 2006
Ops A La Carte shall be exhibiting at the International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED), at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose on March 28th. Please stop by our booth.

- Feb 9-10, 2006
Ops A La Carte holds an RoHS Workshop and 148 people attend. What do you do when you book a room for 50 people and 197 people sign up. Well, that's the problem we were faced with so we split the conference into 3 sessions. And there were a number of people that couldn't make it, so we have scheduled a 4th session on March 7th. See Ops A La Carte Events for more details.

- Feb 2006
Ops A La Carte welcomes 3 more consultants to our team. Please welcome David Thysen, Hal Judy, and Henry Walaszczyk. David brings a new dimension to our team with over 20 years of packaging design experience, this will help in our qualification testing immensely. Hal has many specialized talents in reliability including Markov analyses for complex systems as well as Weibull and Lognormal analysis of infant mortality and EOL (end-of-life) failure modes. And Henry comes to us from the Semiconductor Manufacturing industry, leading teams at Applied Materials and KLA-Tencor through transition towards the quest for higher quality and reliability. Each consultants' profile is shown on our Our Team's webpage.

- Jan 25, 2006
Ops A La Carte presents a paper at the 52nd Annual International Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS) in Newport Beach. You can download a copy of this paper on our website at www.opsalacarte.com/pdfs/Tech_Papers/HALT_vs_ALT-Paper.pdf

- Jan 23-25, 2006
Ops A La Carte exhibits for the first time. Ops A La Carte exhibits at the 52nd Annual International Reliability and Maintainability Symposium. Over 125 participants to the symposium stopped by and chatted with us, more traffic than at any other booth. Due to this success, we have picked out 4 more shows to exhibit at this year. You can see us at the following upcoming shows:

- International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED) on March 28 at the DoubleTree Hotel, San Jose, CA. For more details on the symposium, please go to http://www.isqed.org.

- Design for Manufacturability (D2M) conference (part of the Embedded Systems Conference) on April 4-6 at McEnery Convention Center, San Jose, CA. For more details on the workshop, please go to http://www.embedded.com/esc/sv/d2m.

- Applied Reliability Symposium (ARS) on June 14-16 in Orlando, FL. For more details on the symposium, please go to http://www.arsymposium.org.

- Accelerated Stress Test (AST) Workshop on Oct 4-6 at the Sheraton Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. For more details on the workshop, please go to http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/cpmt/tc7/ast2006.

- Jan, 2006
Ops A La Carte brings on its first Project Manager. Please welcome Sara Isenberg to our team. Sara spent many years at HP developing her project management skills. In December, 2005, we crossed the 50 project mark - working on 50 projects at one time, so to keep up with this growth, we added a much needed Project Manager to manage many of our large accounts. Sara's profile is shown on our Our Team's webpage.

- Dec, 2005
Ops A La Carte releases our new Warranty services. In conjunction with this new service, we wrote a feature article on Warranty in our Fall 2005 Newsletter and updated our service pages following links: Design for Warranty and Warranty Performance Analysis.

- Dec 5, 2005
Ops A La Carte welcomes 3 new consultants to our team. Please welcome Sorin Witzman, Bob Mueller, and Greg Swartz. Sorin is the technical chairman of the local iMAPs chapter and brings a wealth of experience in the areas of Supplier Qualification, Supply Chain Management, and in the physical design of electronic components and IC packaging. Bob is a 30 year veteran out of HP who brings knowledge and experience in the areas of Warranty and Software Reliability. Greg is a veteran of Quality Statistics and Process Improvement, and is also our CQE instructor. Each consultants' profile is shown on our Our Team's webpage.

- Nov 18, 2005
Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman, also chair of the IEEE Reliability Society of Silicon Valley, created an agreement with the ESD Society of Silicon Valley to hold joint meetings and cross market each other's society functions.

- Nov 16, 2005
Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman is a guest presenter at the monthly Project Management Special Interest Group.

- Oct 26, 2005
Ops A La Carte's Fred Schenkelberg is on the committee creating the IEEE guide 1624, a guideline for Reliability Assessment called "Organizational Reliability Capability". This document is due out Summer 2006.

- Oct 22, 2005
IEEE CBS - Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman is a keynote speaker at the annual IEEE Consultants' Business Seminar. Our topic was on "How to Have a Banner Year", highlighting our phenomenal growth over the past 12 months and how we did it.

- Oct 19, 2005
RAMS Conference - Ops A La Carte's Fred Schenkelberg is on the RAMS management committee which met to put the final touches on this year's symposium to be held in Los Angeles in January, 2006.

- Oct 18, 2005
RoHS Workshop Tour - Ops A La Carte is part of a 6 city national tour on RoHS, hosted by Wilson Sonsini. We gave a presentation and participated on the panel discussion at the workshop entitled Risks during a Restriction on Hazardous Materials (RoHS) Transition held in 6 cities around the US. Event was sponsored by Alliance of Service Providers in Manufacturing (ASPMFG).

- Oct 12, 2005
ASME IRD - Ops A La Carte is a co-sponsor of ASME annual IRD. Ops A La Carte is a key sponsor to the American Society Of Mechanical Engineers annual Industrial Relations Dinner. Key members of the national office were there as well as over 60 distinguished members of the local ASME chapter.

- Aug 3, 2005
iMAPS Presentation - Ops A La Carte hosts the bi-monthly iMAPS meeting with a presentation on Failure Analysis Alternatives, highlighting the use of Lot Acceptance Testing as a means to monitor supplier outgoing quality.

- July 26, 2005
RoHS Panel of Experts. Ops A La Carte is part of panel of experts for RoHS discussion hosted by Wilson Sonsini. Event was sponsored by Alliance of Service Providers in Manufacturing (ASPMFG). Based on response for event, ASPMFG decides to launch a 6-city tour on RoHS and invites Ops A La Carte to be one of the panel members for the tour.

- June 23, 2005
Ops A La Carte's Randall Ortland was part of a 12 member panel to work on the next revision of American Society of Quality's (ASQ's) Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE) Exam. The meeting took place in Minneapolis.

- June 16, 2005
Ops A La Carte hosts a webinar discussion on Accelerated Life Testing. The webinar is part of QualMark's monthly "Ask the Experts" series.

- May 3, 2005
Ops A La Carte is part of panel of experts for discussion on HALT and HASS, hosted by Hobbs Engineering.

- April 26, 2005
Ops A La Carte teams up with Better Management to give a live one hour webinar on The Value of Warranty Data.

- April 15, 2005
Ops A La Carte's Fred Schenkelberg has been appointed on the RAMS Management Committee for the 4th year in a row. Ops A La Carte's Fred Schenkelberg has been appointed treasurer on the American Society of Quality (ASQ) National Committee.

- March 15, 2005
Ops A La Carte's Mike Silverman has been appointed IEEE Reliability Society Silicon Valley Chapter Chair and Ops A La Carte's Fred Schenkelberg has been appointed Chapter Vice Chair.

OPS A LA CARTE NEW EMAIL NEWSLETTER
- February 25, 2005

Ops A La Carte's new Email newsletter called Reliability News is now available. This is a quarterly publication filled with timely information and useful tips on Reliability services and education seminars.

If you would like a FREE subscription to Reliability News, Ops A La Carte's Email newsletter, please use our contact form.

Your privacy is respected and your information will not be sold or shared with others. To remove your subscription at any time, send an email with the word REMOVE in the subject line.

View a copy of our newsletter

OPS A LA CARTE WEBSITE
- December 9, 2004

Ops A La Carte completed the expansion and redesign of our website in December, 2004 and we have added many new Reliability Services and Educational Seminars. Please go to our Reliability Services section for more information.

MANY NEW RELIABILITY SERVICES ADDED
- December 1, 2004

In addition to some of our core services that we've offered for several years such as Reliability Predictions, FMECA's, HALT and HASS, and Reliability Demonstration Tests, we have added many more services over the past year. Now we have a complete set of Reliability Services to help you through your product's entire life cycle.

Our most popular Reliability Service over the past 6 months has been our Reliability Program Assessment service in which we assess your Organization's reliability maturity and then recommend an approach on how we can help you improve your Reliability Program.

And with the new Lead-Free initiative, we have introduced our new Removal of Hazardous Materials (RoHS)/Lead Free service in which we help you through this transition by determining areas of risk, providing awareness training, and helping to establish critical transition goals and metrics. We have teamed up with DFR Solutions, world leaders in lead-free research and education, to make this a very powerful service offering.

Contact our webmaster to report technical/site problems or broken links.

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