How often did you agree?
You do not have to be a genius to know that every Yes as an answer on the previous statements has a negative effect on the reliability of a product. The more Yes, the more the problem changes from reliability to unreliability.
The important question is how your answer will fit in the answers from other participants and its meaning. The table below indicates how many participants agreed with how many statements.
| Total Yes | % | Cumulative |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1,1 | 1,1 |
| 1 | 0,0 | 1,1 |
| 2 | 3,2 | 4,3 |
| 3 | 4,3 | 8,6 |
| 4 | 12,9 | 21,5 |
| 5 | 10,8 | 32,3 |
| 6 | 14,0 | 46,3 |
| 7 | 16,1 | 62,4 |
| 8 | 12,9 | 75,3 |
| 9 | 14,0 | 89,3 |
| 10 | 7,5 | 96,8 |
| 11 | 3,2 | 100,0 |
| 12 | 0,0 | 100,0 |
From this table, derived from about 950 forms, the next conclusions can be derived:
- 7,7 is the mean number of statements they agreed with
- 8,6 % of the participants agreed on 3 statements or less
- 25% agreed with 8 or more statements.
So, and what does it mean?
- A score of 0 (no agreement at all) means you are reliability aware. Congratulations. You can stop reading.
- A score of 1-3 means you are reliability aware enough but some specific items need to be addressed. You have both reliability as well as unreliability problems. However it requires specific knowledge and good developers together with good reliability engineers to tackle these. But it can be managed.
- With a score of 4 or more you move into the danger area. Unreliability (top-down) problems outgrows the reliability (bottom-up) problems. With a score of 4 -7 you might have serious problems in the top-down chain. With the right devotion and active support from top-down, supported by a good basic course on unreliability it can be changed into a better result after 3-5 years. What? That long? Yes. Reliability is a long term issue.
- With a score of 8 or more you should feel helpless but not hopeless. There is a major lack of unreliability awareness. Reliability is exclusively determined by chance not by choice. Improvement is a real challenge and long term and exhausting. Most will not succeed. For many reasons.
Don't take the score results too literally, because it also depends on what statements one agreed. To make it more complicated it also depends the combinations of the various Yes/No answers. This would require a more complex ranking but in the end with too little added value. More important is the agreed statements and their judgments of Relia-Easy in the next articles.
How were the individual statements ranked?
This is also very interesting and can be seen in the next table in order of importance
| Number Yes (%) | # | Statement |
|---|---|---|
| 78 | 12 | Purchasing department has their focus mainly on the lowest cost price and/or availability and not in reliability |
| 74 | 11 | We get too little time and/or products for reliability testing |
| 65 | 6 | Our top-down management put high pressure on reliability improvements, year after year. |
| 65 | 7 | Field returns show unexpected failure modes or no defect founds |
| 57 | 9 | Suppliers are not accessed on their reliability capabilities |
| 57 | 1 | We are suffering from too high warranty costs for many years |
| 56 | 8 | We use outsourcing development because they can do it cheaper and/or faster |
| 47 | 5 | Too many batches from the factory show failures and need rework/repair |
| 45 | 2 | We have a company wide reliability improvement program running for years but with too little consistent improvement |
| 41 | 4 | We have failures in the factory but their root-causes are unknown |
| 41 | 10 | We do not have a reliability engineering department |
| 35 | 3 | We are reliability aware because we have several ISO certificates, Six Sigma projects and black belts available |
All statements are discussed in the next articles.
Remark: All results come from participants of various symposia and in-house courses for companies who had serious problems. That means that the results could be biased.