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.