What You Need to Know About MTBF

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

MTBF stands for mean time between failure.' This sounds intuitively easy to understand. But if you haven't taken the time to understand MTBF, and your organization relies on the reliability of its products, you are almost certainly in trouble.

For example, it is statistically possible for almost all of your equipment or products to have failed by the MTBF. Did you know that? Most equipment and products age.' That is, they go through stages of infant mortality, useful life, and wear out.

Did you know that just talking about MTBF (and nothing else) means that you are assuming that your equipment or products never age? Did you know that (by definition) it is impossible to understand when you should service your equipment based on the MTBF?

This presentation is a simple introduction that doesn't use complex words to explain some of the basic concepts of reliability engineering. In particular, how things like MTBF are so easy to misunderstand and how relying on the easy' metrics does more harm than good.

This Accendo Reliability webinar originally broadcast on 13 August 2019.

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To view the recorded video/audio of the event, visit the webinar page.

Related Content

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Only have MTBFs episode
Vendor MTBF Claim episode
MTBF, Reliability, and the Curve episode

Exploring Alternatives to MTBF

You may already know my position on MTBF. If not, in short, do not use MTBF at all, ever, in any form. So what should we use instead.

What To Do When A Customer Requests MTBF

what specific steps you can take to help your customer actually use your the stated reliability goal and not MTBF.