Reliability Questions and Decisions

Reliability Questions and Decisions

Very few reliability decisions are made by reliability engineers. Yet, reliability engineers are asked many questions concerning reliability. How reliable will this design be for customers? How will the system likely fail? How many failures should we expect next month?

How you answer these and the many other questions received does impact the reliability of your product or system. The information provided those that ask reliability related questions, with useful and practical information, can make better decisions which improves reliability performance.

Relationship Between Questions and Decisions

As I’ve said before, ‘Reliability occurs at the point of decision’. When an engineer selects one material type versus another, or one component versus another, or a vendor over another, those are decisions. These decision directly impact the product’s reliability performance.

Implied within each decision is a question. For example, when deciding on a vendor to provide power supplies, the underlying question is ‘which vendor should we select in this situation?’ We make decisions to resolve questions concerning optimizations, comparisons, objectives, measurements, preventions, priorities, and resources.