Reliability Knowledge? Who? What? Where?

This article is the first in a series addressing the availability of reliability knowledge, who has it and how you can take advantage of it to improve products and systems. Despite a broad interest in reliability, there is a general lack of coordination of the efforts of many disparate organizations dealing with reliability issues.

In recent years, industry and academia have taken over the leadership role in reliability research from the Department of Defense. Table 1 identifies many of the international organizations that play a role in reliability (our apologies for leaving anyone out).

Table 1-International Organizations Contributing to Reliability

Another area of reliability knowledge is training. The University of Maryland Center for Reliability Engineering is the international leader in formal R&M education and now offers all of its R&M courses on-line. For those interested in “short term” training there are a number of sources such as those indicated in Table 2.

Table 2-Sources of Short Term R&M Training

If you need reliability training but can’t schedule the time to attend a short-term course, on-line asynchronous (

training at the times that are convenient to you) is for you. Quanterion has just released the first on-line training courses of a five part series in all the topics of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE) Body of Knowledge. It’s called “REPERTOIRE.” You need not be preparing to take the CRE exam to benefit from the courses; the ASQ structure just provides a convenient way the organize the reliability content. What makes these on-line courses more effective is that they’re interactive with frequent quizzes that are scored, and they also have selectable audio to accompany the presentations. Click here to take the demo course.

How about tools for reliability? There are lots of quality suppliers of reliability tools and we’re not going to recommend one over the others, but we will list a few that are “significant” in the marketplace.

Table 3-Significant Reliability Software Vendors

As long as we’re talking tools, Quanterion just released its new version of QuART(Quanterion Automated Reliability Toolkit), called QuART ER. It doubles the number of tools previously available in QuART and includes the first in the REPERTOIRE training course series mentioned above.

How about an entire “environment” of reliability data, information, advisors, and tools? Well, we’re working on it for the Army. We’re developing a “Product Reliability On-line Tools Collection (PROTOCOL)” environment that will be a web-based environment of all kinds of reliability knowledge that will help you design and build reliable products, and to also track their reliability after release. It will look something like Figure 1. Details will follow in a future edition of Reliability Ques.

Figure 1-PROTOCOL Reliability Environment