Reliability engineering focuses on costs of failure caused by system downtime, which includes cost of spare parts, equipment repair, equipment overhaul, personnel and equipment warranty.
Reliability engineering involves an iterative process of reliability assessment and improvement, and the relationship between these two aspects is important.
In general, the objective of reliability engineering is to carry out an assessment as to the reliability of facility equipment and identify potential areas for improvement. This includes improvement not only in equipment design but also in terms of how it is operated and how it is maintained.
For an organization, reliability engineering helps quantify product quality by adding the dimension of time to the quality equation. In other words, we no longer just want to know if a product can perform its intended function at the moment of purchase. Instead, we want to make sure that the product works without major malfunctions under normal conditions for as long as possible.
Reliability engineering does not only help organizations produce more reliable products, but it also informs maintenance teams on how to maintain them to increase MTBF (mean time between failures) and asset life span.
However, since no one can predict the future and guarantee that a product won’t fail for exactly X hours of use, calculating reliability comes with a dose of uncertainty that is expressed in the form of probability.
Among other things, organizations can use reliability calculation to estimate what is the chance that a system will work properly after x hours or days of use. Naturally, the reliability of any system will be high in the beginning and decline over time.
Reliability is often confused with durability, quality and availability. While the concepts are similar, they should not be used interchangeably.
Want to learn more? Tonex offers a large selection of Reliability Engineering Training courses –training that benefits most engineering specializations including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and applied statistics.
Additionally, these courses are excellent for product managers, project managers and production supervisors or anyone else who wants to learn the foundation of reliability engineering through hands-on activities and directed classroom discussion.
Courses offered include:
Reliability Engineering 101 (2 days)
Software Reliability Training (4 days)
Reliability Engineering Principles Training for Managers (3 days)
Risk and Reliability Engineering Training (3 days)
For more information, questions, comments, contact us.