Chris and Fred tackle the issue of dismissing failures, particularly in engineering and product development. They discuss the pitfalls of prototypes often ignored as one-offs, advocating for a deeper understanding of failures to improve designs. The conversation delves into the complexities of 'no fault found' reports and intermittent failures, emphasizing the value of proactive failure analysis. A case study on a fan hub explosion highlights the importance of addressing manufacturing and maintenance issues. Ultimately, they argue that embracing failures can drive continuous improvement.
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question_answer ANECDOTE
Client Ignores Real Failures
A client dismissed many field failures using a complex gauntlet of reasons to report "acceptable" failure rates.
This practice ignored manufacturing defects, customer abuse, and design flaws, hiding true reliability problems.
insights INSIGHT
Failures Are Valuable Treasures
Failures contain valuable information and are treasures for learning and improvement.
Ignoring "no fault found" cases means missing chances to identify hidden or intermittent problems.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Contract Issues Masquerade as Failures
A large return batch was labeled "failed units" but were unopened, returned due to contract restocking fees.
This was a contract issue, not a product failure, illustrating how business problems can mask as technical ones.
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Chris and Fred discuss a common problem of dismissing or ignoring failures, especially when they don’t fit your ‘profile.’
Key Points
Join Chris and Fred as they discuss the problems and hazards that arise when a failure occurs and is ignored. This can be tricky, as it can sometimes be hard to spot them.
Topics include:
Prototype failures dismissed as ‘it’s a prototype and a one-off.’ Then why even make prototypes? Most decisions are based on ‘confidence.’ And we can go to all sorts of different places to get it. The best way to gain confidence is to thoroughly understand how something fails and recognize that future designs can address the root cause. Another approach to gaining confidence is to comply with standards, which is not the best way, but it involves less thinking. And yet another is to have products pass tests. So, we either create tests that are easy to pass to generate ‘confidence,’ or simply dismiss any failures for whatever reason we can, to maintain the façade of confidence.
Field failures dismissed due to ‘no fault found.’ Intermittent failures are notoriously difficult to address. We simply need to determine what caused the failure so that we can take appropriate action. Or do we? If we cannot replicate the failure, then we can take steps to prevent it from occurring again in the future by placing sensors, adding additional code, and so on. Alternatively, you can conduct a Root Cause Analysis (RCA), which involves identifying the likely causes of failure for future investigation. The trouble with RCA … is you need to do some additional thinking!
… or ’caused by user.’ As a rule, customers or users don’t want to break the thing they bought. Yet many manufacturers and producers act as if their users and customers have nothing better to do than try to break products, and spend time without the product working, while they belligerently demand someone take them seriously. There is no doubt that one or two people like this exist, but there are probably more ‘bigfoots.’ If a customer or user says something failed, chances are it did.
Every failure holds information, if not dismissed. It is crazy how many organizations pay a lot of money to get reliability information by testing things to failure … and yet ignore other tests or field failures when it doesn’t suit them. Each failure has a story to tell, and chances are that if you address the failure in front of you, you resolve plenty of others before they ever occur as well.
Enjoy an episode of Speaking of Reliability. Where you can join friends as they discuss reliability topics. Join us as we discuss topics ranging from design for reliability techniques to field data analysis approaches.
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