RELIABILITY
Reliability Engineering is an engineering discipline that collaborates across a company to ensure technologies and products can reliably operate within the expected use-cases and for a defined period of time. An important guardrail for a successful reliability program includes setting a budget for acceptable faults, failures, or issues. A “zero-failure” target sets a very conservative approach to assessments, causing a high investment in targeting an impossible task of zero field risk. On the other hand, a lax reliability target causes an unfavorable long term bottom line as brand strength, operational costs, and warranty amortizations are negatively affected by unreliable products. Companies have different approaches to what is acceptable for reliability risk and considerations need to be made around market competition, brand, and customer acceptability. Severity, occurrence, and detectability need to be considered when determining what is acceptable risk for a company. The approach to risk mitigations needs to be aligned vertically within a company. Though reliability recommendations are ripe with analyses, risk management needs to focus on the end customer in order to delight and exceed their expectations. Understanding comprehensive customer expectations is a heavy lift in itself and another layer of complete product management.
The Reliability Engineering function leverages physics-of-failure knowledge, accelerated life testing, accommodation of end-user diversity, and statistical analyses to ensure designs can achieve proper demonstrated reliability at mass production scale. Reliability is difficult and costly to test into a product. Design-for-Reliability is an upstream partnership that enables productization by integrating reliability considerations during architectural phases. A strong Reliability program will leverage design principles, simulations, and demonstrated reliability assessments. The goal of a reliability program is to demonstrate that the design is of appropriate reliability and that mass production manufacturing doesn’t incur too many additional risks.
In consumer electronics, this typically these can be observed as:
As you navigate your current or next project, are there opportunities you see to improve a reliability program? In which section does improvement lie?