Customer Reviews

Improving Product Reliability: Strategies and Implementation (Quality and Reliability Engineering Series)

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This book explains in a very easy and practical way why reliability is important and what are the aspects that impact product's reliability. This book provides various guidelines on how to successfully improve products' reliability. Moreover, with its practical approach, it can be used by managers, reliability engineers, designers, etc..., everyone who wants to develop better products in a cost and time effective way. The book clearly explains what are the common (internal and external) barriers to implement a reliability program and why reliability efforts can fail. The entire product's life cycle (PLC)---from the concept phase till the end-of-life phase---and what needs to be done in each one of its phases is thoroughly described. The authors stress the importance of having a proactive reliability process, that starts early in the product concept phase, and that involves all the PLC phases in order to be successful.

This is not a book on Reliability Theory; there are no math equations or statistics -- but it refers you to the very best references and consultants for that. This is a book about making an impact on your company by improving the reliability of its products. It covers the product Life Cycle from concept to obsolescence with what to at every step. It touches every subject important to starting and sustaining a revolution on product reliability right down to the practical details like what kind of people to hire, what equipment to buy, how to budget for and ensure success installing and running a reliability lab, etc., etc. Written at a level so anyone can understand it -- within any size company -- written in a conversational tone like a fireside chat. A great reference for anyone involved in any aspect of improving product reliability.

I liked the book overall but have to comment on what is in my opinion, a poor choice of nomenclature. In Chapter 7, the authors use the term "functional block diagram" to denote what most engineers would term an "operational flow diagram". I found it irritating to the point of distraction. Unfortunately, there seems to be a penchant among reliability and quality assurance professionals to coin and use acronyms, often at the expense of common understanding. If you can get over that, the ideas the authors are trying to communicate are worthwhile.

This new book is a refreshing reliability approach to improving the reliability of products. It doesn't follow the ususal statistical approaches to describing reliability after the fact. It is not filled with equations for calculation. Rather, the authors suggest ways for companies to change how they develop products and for people to become actively involved in this process. A wide variety of topics are covered, from establishing a MRB to setting up a HALT lab to staffing. All of these provide great help for those who wish to learn from the lessons of others. This is a people oriented book aimed at helping engineers overcome the common company hurdles to improvement. It6 should be on the book shelf of every reliability engineer.