Track 3 Session 2

10:30 to 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Distributed Reliability Analysis

The rapidly changing economic landscape has resulted in organizational changes that impact reliability engineering. Reliability expertise was originally well established with a central team and at least one expert at each design site. But some design centers have closed, others have been created and design work is being distributed across the globe. We responded to these challenges by separating standard reliability tasks for design from specialized analysis, and distributing the standard tasks to each design center through the use of common internally-developed tools and processes. Tools were developed using Microsoft Excel® for the standard tasks of failure rate estimation, service life estimation and FMECA. Standard reliability engineering now takes place across the globe with oversight by only a few experts. This allows the few remaining reliability experts to focus on more complex activities such as availability modeling. Moving reliability tasks to the design teams also moves the ownership, providing increased awareness of quantitative impacts of design decisions on product reliability.

Key Words: Failure Rate, Estimation, Telcordia, SR-332, Excel, Workbook, Library, Excel, BOM, Bill-Of-Material, Service Life, FMECA, Tools

Daniel Weed and Harry Weber

Emerson Network Power

Tempe, Arizona