I have received several calls lately to our Australia / New Zealand office about whether it is acceptable to use published failure rates that seem too good to be true.
The person calling is usually doing a SIL verification calculation for an operating plant or for an…
Reliability Engineering experts know there are many variables that impact operational failure rates. These variables even include how operations and maintenance are done at a specific site. Sometimes it feels like there are so many variables that no realistic failure rate can ever be predicted without a few hundred hours of…
Have a formal process for tracking, recording, and classifying field shipments and failure returns.
If your product was designed well in the first place, even if strict adherence to IEC 61508 was not followed, your field failure rate should be pretty low.
Using Proven-In-Use (PIU) methodology will…