The twelve statements
Below there are 12 statements ever created long time ago. Many more can be given but these 12 are used so many times on symposia and courses that they will remain in place for comparison.
Answers should be given especially by top-downers and bottom-uppers
Each statement has three possible answers:
- (Y) Yes, I agree
- (N) No, I do not agree
- (?) I do not know or the question is irrelevant
The results were at least surprising and for some participants even shocking.
In a future update these statements will be put in a form for easier analysis
The twelve statements are:
- We are suffering from too high warranty costs for many years
- We have a company wide reliability improvement program running for years but with too little consistent improvement
- We are reliability aware because we have several ISO certificates, Six Sigma projects and black belts available
- We have failures in the factory but their root-causes are unknown
- Too many batches from the factory show failures and need rework/repair
- Our top-down management put high pressure on reliability improvements, year after year.
- Field returns show unexpected failure modes or no defect founds
- We use outsourcing development because they can do it cheaper and/or faster
- Suppliers are not accessed on their reliability capabilities
- We do not have a reliability engineering department
- We get too little time and/or products for reliability testing
- Purchasing department has their focus mainly on the lowest cost price and/or availability and not in reliability
The answers are used to analyze if your problems are in the area of reliability, unreliability or both
If you wish you can mail your results to relia-easy . I prefer a sequence of 13 characters.
The first character is a T, B or X depending on being a Top-downer, Bottom-upper or someone else. Then follows the 12 characters for the answers.
Example: TYYNYN?YNYN?Y
Suggestion
These 12 statements are not the only ones to determine if one is reliabity aware or not. It just gives an indication. There are many more "audits" available with more specific checks in the area of reliability. Many audits deal with quality. But that differs from reliability.
Reliability aware companies often use a DFR (Design For Reliability) handbook with clear descriptions how to create a reliable product. It gives information on:
- how defects are to be found during the development project and start of production
- temperature behavior
- derating of components
- requirements for suppliers
- testprocedures
- field problem tracking
- ...
It is recommended to execute an audit if there are doubts about the reliability awareness of your own company. It surely gives ideas for improvement.