Reliability Engineering

What is Reliability Engineering?
Reliability engineering is the function of analyzing the expected or actual reliability of a product, process or service, and identifying the actions to reduce failures or mitigate their effects.
Engineers analyzing reliability typically carry out reliability predictions, FMEA or FMECA, design testing programs, monitor and analyze field failures, and suggest design or manufacturing changes.
The overall goal of reliability engineering is to make your product more reliable in order to reduce repairs, lower costs, and maintain your company's reputation. To achive this goal, reliability engineering should be applied at all levels of design and production, with all engineers involved.
 
Reliability engineering is a sub-discipline of systems engineering that emphasizes the ability of equipment to function without failure.
Reliability engineering refers to the systematic application of best engineering practices and techniques to make more reliable products in a cost-effective manner. Reliability engineering methodology can be applied across the product lifecycle: from design and manufacturing to operation and maintenance.
 
 project lifecycle
 
  
Reliability is defined as the probability that a product, system, or service will perform its intended function adequately for a specified period of time, or will operate in a defined environment without failure.
The most important components of this definition must be clearly understood to fully know how reliability in a product or service is established:
 

• Probability: the likelihood of mission success

• Intended function: for example, to light, cut, rotate, or hea

• Satisfactory: perform according to a specification, with an acceptable degree of complian

• Specific period of time: minutes, days, months, or number of cycles

• Specified conditions: for example, temperature, speed, or pressure

• Stated another way, reliability can be seen as:
 

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ALD presents an integrated approach to reliability engineering. Look at our Reliability Engineering Services to learn more on how ALD can help you achieve your goal of creating a more reliable and cost-effective product or service.

Our services
Look at our Services list as a way to implement new design processes for trouble-free products.
Reliability division of ALD provides a wide range of consulting services in the areas of reliability engineering for Hi-Tech industries:
 • Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety
 • Integrated Logistics Support (ILS)
 • Failure Data Collection & Analysis
 • Thermal Analysis
If you design or manufacture products or systems, there are good chances that we can help you improve them resulting in higher profitability and customer satisfaction.
ALD offers product reliability consulting services to assist manufacturers in predicting product reliability and serviceability while your product is still in the design phase and save you both time and money.

Our engineers will work closely with your product engineering team to ensure that the results of these analyses are used to accomplish our common objective: superior product reliability and maintainability.

If you're a supplier, we can:
• Analyze or evaluate your products' reliability
• Help you understand your customers' needs
• Define your company's approach to quality and reliability
• Serve as an independent reliability expert assessing the effectiveness of your policies and approaches at the organizational or product level
• Solve reliability problems related to your product

If you're a customer, we can:
• Help you choose the "right" suppliers
• Define reliability requirements for suppliers products
• Assess the R&M of products you are procuring

Several techniques that we use to assure/improve product reliability:

• Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety (RAMS)
  o Reliability Program Plan
  o Reliability Prediction, Models & Analysis
  o Failure Mode Analysis (FMEA, FMECA)
  o Fault Tree Analysis (FTA)
  o Testability and BIT/BITE Analysis
  o Part Stress and Derating analysis
  o Monitoring of Subcontractors/Part Control
  o Maintainability Prediction and Analysis
  o Reliability Test Planning
  o Reliability Growth Test Planning
  o Safety Assessment
  o Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)
  o Environmental Stress Screening (ESS/HALT/HASS)
  o Environmental Qualification Test Plans
  o Availability and Readiness Analysis
  o Reliability Problem Solving
 o Answering to RFP (Request For Proposal), Statements of work (SOW), Reliability and Maintainability (R&M) Specifications

• Integrated Logistics Support (ILS)
  o Design, planning and analysis of ILSP according to SOW's
  o Logistics support analysis (LSA)
  o Spare Parts prediction and optimization
  o Life Cycle Cost (LCC)
  o Advanced inventory planning, development and analysis for initial acquisition
  o Definition of Support/Test equipment (SE/TE) needs and evaluation of  "TE load"
  o Estimation of cost and resources required for developing a support system
  o Concurrent Engineering
  o Cost-Effectiveness and Trade-Off analyses
  o Optimal Repair Level Analysis (ORLA/LORA)

• Failure Data Collection & Analysis
  o Failure Data Collecting & Processing
  o Trend Analysis
  o Corrective Actions
  o Field Reliability Analysis
 o Consulting, development and support of failure/maintenance reporting systems (FRACAS/MRS)

• Thermal Analysis/Design
  o Thermal Activities for Project Phases
  o Thermal Design
  o Thermal Modeling

Our Experience
Our consultants are experienced professionals in RAMS, ILS, LCC analyses, Thermal Management.
They provide superior engineering support to the program to which they are assigned.
We have performed RAMS activities for projects controlled by the largest Israel Companies: Elta, Elop, Elbit, Rafael, Tadiran, etc.
Our approach to design evaluation from reliability point of view is to provide our clients with the most effective level of design support and improvement.

Our consultants performed hundreds of projects in Aerospace, Avionics, Defense, Telecommunication, Electronics, Computers, Commercial industries:
 • Satellite, aircraft, avionics and missile mounted equipment (radars, telecommunication, optical observation, control systems)
 • Vehicles mounted equipment (communication, optical observation and control)
 • Telecommunication system/modules/cards
 • Data processing and storage systems
 • Automatic Optical Inspection (AOI) System for Printed Circuit layers
 • Commercial equipment: Air Conditioners, etc.

Reliability Engineering Software Tools
ALD provides a set of integrated software tools for Reliability Engineering and Failure Analysis - see ALD Reliability Engineering and Safety Engineering Software for more information.

See also:
Reliability Services 
Reliability, Safety and Quality Services 
ALD Reliability, Safety and Quality Software 
ALD Reliability Engineering Software Downloads 
ALD Reliability Software, Safety and Quality Solutions