Forwarding for Paul Darrell Locke
-----Original Message----- From: Paul Paroff Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2002 7:44 AM To: Darrell Locke Subject: RE: Creating a Reliability Department 1) From the Manufacturing side I would study warranty and other returns, customer complaints, and field service and repairs. So you may need a database to organize and the means to collect the data. From there I would find the top 5 to 10 most frequent and most expensive problems and work with both Development and Manufacturing to improve materials, designs and manufacturing techniques. The contribution to the bottom line can be tracked through lower warranty expense and fewer service calls. An increase in customer satisfaction is likely to occur over time which will likely result in more sales and increased customer loyalty but it's hard to connect the effort in reliability with such soft numbers. (Besides, Sales will take the credit.) 2) Start with one person as you outlined, but they will need support in gathering and processing data. A second step could be to add a reliability engineer on the development side who would work on proving the reliability of new designs. This function would get early prototypes and see what breaks or wears out first under different use models and environments. You could then add a technician or two as the work load warrants. 3) Reliability in manufacturing would not constitute a conflict of interest as compliance could. Compliance is more like an unbiased judge where Reliability provides input to improve products to make them more robust. Good luck, Paul Paroff Reliability Engineer. -----Original Message----- From: marti...@appliedbiosystems.com [mailto:marti...@appliedbiosystems.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2002 1:16 PM To: emc-p...@majordomo.ieee.org Subject: Creating a Reliability Department I have been given a consulting opportunity to develop a plan for a Reliability Department for a fairly large manufacturing company of Laboratory Equipment. Since my background is in compliance I could use some advice on how to get started. 1. The goal is to hire one permanent employee and grow over time. What are some justifications/success stories/strategies for having a Reliability Department? 2. Assuming the goal is to have the best reliability department in the world, how do we get started? What are the stages which should be followed for developing a Reliability Group? What would staffing requirements look like for each phase? 3. The goal is to have this position report to Manufacturing Engineering. >From a compliance standpoint, this would be a conflict of interest. Does the same hold true for Reliability Engineering? 4. This department may include a global function. What is the best method to integrate this department globally? All responses are greatly appreciated Regards Joe Martin EMC/Product Safety Engineer ------------------------------------------- This message is from the IEEE EMC Society Product Safety Technical Committee emc-pstc discussion list. Visit our web site at: http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/emcs/pstc/ To cancel your subscription, send mail to: majord...@ieee.org with the single line: unsubscribe emc-pstc For help, send mail to the list administrators: Ron Pickard: emc-p...@hypercom.com Dave Heald: davehe...@mediaone.net For policy questions, send mail to: Richard Nute: ri...@ieee.org Jim Bacher: j.bac...@ieee.org All emc-pstc postings are archived and searchable on the web at: http://ieeepstc.mindcruiser.com/ Click on "browse" and then "emc-pstc mailing list" ------------------------------------------- This message is from the IEEE EMC Society Product Safety Technical Committee emc-pstc discussion list. Visit our web site at: http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/emcs/pstc/ To cancel your subscription, send mail to: majord...@ieee.org with the single line: unsubscribe emc-pstc For help, send mail to the list administrators: Ron Pickard: emc-p...@hypercom.com Dave Heald: davehe...@mediaone.net For policy questions, send mail to: Richard Nute: ri...@ieee.org Jim Bacher: j.bac...@ieee.org All emc-pstc postings are archived and searchable on the web at: http://ieeepstc.mindcruiser.com/ Click on "browse" and then "emc-pstc mailing list"