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Track 2 Session 2
10:30 to 11:30 a.m. Wednesday March 25, 2009
Modern Reliability Engineering Based on
Quality Principles
This presentation argues that principles published by leaders on
quality, such as Shewhart, Deming and Crosby, can be used to define reliability (and reliability
engineering), and identify value-added reliability engineering activities that comply with these
principles. Reliability can be defined as the absence of failures in products. This basic viewpoint
implies that reliability engineering should focus on prevention of failure during development and
production, and not on correction of failure during operations. Understanding and anticipating the
possible causes of failure are fundamental to preventing them. How can this be achieved during
product development? Failure prevention can be pursued by using specific analysis and test
activities, which should be selected for their ability to identify and to eliminate both design
and production deficiencies. The presentation provides some details on the integration of reliability
engineering into product development, explains why reliability prediction and demonstration based
on fundamentally flawed assumptions should not be used during development and production, and
concludes with examples of good practices used by successful companies.
Key Words: Reliability Engineering, Quality Leaders, Failure Prevention, Verification,
Analysis, Testing
Albertyn Barnard
Lambda Consulting
South Africa |
