A Reliability Program Assessment is a detailed evaluation of your entire organization's approach and processes across all departments that are involved in creating your products ^*. The assessment captures the current state of your organization and leads to an actionable Reliability Program Plan (RPP).

When to perform a Reliability Program Assessment^*

You need to perfrom an assessment when:
- An established company is trying aggressively to improve their reliability due to a large number of failures in-house and/or in the field.
- An established company is spending too much money on warranty re- turns and needs to find a way to reduce it.
- An established company doesn't know its own stage of reliability on its products or doesn't know why its products are being returned.
- An established company is trying to get into a new market
- A new company is developing its first product.
- A company, established or new, has never written a reliability plan.

Why to perform a Reliability Program Assessment^*

You need to perfrom an assessment because:
- A Reliability Program Assessment identifies systemic changes that impact reliability.
- It ties into the culture of your organization and to the product.
- It also provides a roadmap for activities that achieve results.
- It is the matching of capabilities and expectations.
- Allows optimizing the investment in reliability

MTBF Montreal offers an online anonymous quiz, tailored to the Assessment of the Reliability Program, which allows weighting the answers based on the role of the person answering.
The tool comes with a set of in-house developed questions.

MTBF Montreal partners will read the results with you and identify the optimum development steps.

Either in English or French, all our tailored seminars come with a variety of tools and practical examples. For more details, please contact us.

Our expertise is spread over the entire life of a program. Industry oriented, we value any action that long-term secures your business. For more details, please contact us.

We can help with:

Negotiation

buying a large fleet When investing in a large park of items, you need to know what you’re buying. Most of the contracts rely heavily on warranty, which does not cover the additional costs of the non-availability due to down time, company image, client satisfaction, stocks, mechanics, etc. The “wait and see what happens because the vendor pays for the fix” is not a robust approach, especially in today’s results-oriented business environment. Take full control over your business and count in the risk you might be facing when relying exclusively on the warranty. We can support evaluating the Reliability of the fleet and expose the risk areas you might be facing. We employ a complete set of tools to either audit the vendor or to validate the claimed reliability targets. If the vendor convinces us, your business is safe. Tailored to your needs, we can audit on or ask justification for the reliability targets validation (design capability) or for the reliability targets demonstration (testing). A valuable tool that we propose is the operational / business risk assessment that highlights the potential weak points of the fleet, classified by the specific impact on the business case. If the safety assessment is a concern to you, we can always evaluate or audit the performed safety studies. We are also here to support a design comparison among multiple offers. We can help you choose not based on the cheapest price, but on the right long-term operating price, considering the selling price, the reliability, the maintenance cost, as well as the operational / business risk assessment. buying few units with high availability Availability is your top priority, though acquisition cost is essential too. Unscheduled down-times would jeopardize your business case, your operating costs, your image in front of your clients, your lean production, would make you spend money on unused work force, would delay your deliveries, etc.? Rather than performing routine calendar-based inspections and component replacement, predictive techniques monitor equipment for pending failures and notify you when a part replacement is required. Sensors embedded in equipment check for abnormal conditions and trigger work orders when safe operating limits are breeched. Rather than performing routine calendar-based inspections and component replacement, the predictive techniques monitor the equipment for pending failures and notify you when a part replacement is required. Sensors embedded in equipment check for abnormal conditions and trigger work orders when safe operating limits are breeched. The downside is the increase complexity of the control system and the nuisances. Make sure your units are equipped with the optimized set of sensors. Let us provide our expertise in increasing the availability of the design. position against competition when selling to a customer You need to better position against the competition and win the offer, increase customer’s image on you, highlight your efforts and investment in Reliability, beat the competition? Convince your customer to submit us, along with your proposed design, the competitors’ ones and we will confidentially evaluate and provide a comparison among the long-term risks he's exposing to. benchmarking Organizations that focus on improving reliability eventually realize that they must measure themselves against the best in the industry to know if their approach toward improvement is keeping pace with the competition. Only through consistent, external benchmarking is an organization able to measure itself competitively. When companies fail to set out on the journey of reliability and performance improvement, profitability isn't maximized. In addition, without external benchmarking, untapped potential is unknown, and opportunity may be left on the table. Top performance can only be achieved by improvements in reliability as verified by external benchmarking .

Concept and Design

DFMEA The Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (DFMEA) is a disciplined analysis of the part design with the intent to correct or prevent the design-based failure modes prior to the first production run. DFMEA is used to uncover design risk, which includes possible failure, degradation of performance and potential hazards. The DFMEA needs to be done early in the product design cycle, after the design concept has been selected since it needs detailed part functions; it should be continually updated as the program develops. The information developed from the DFMEA will provide excellent input for the earlier phases of the Concurrent Engineering or Integrated Product Development processes, and vice versa. Having some timing overlap (concurrency) between the DFMEA and the PFMEA will further reduce the Time to Market. If an existing design, on which there is already a DFMEA, is applied in a different environment or usage, then the FMEA should be focused on the impact of the new environment or application. Let our open-minded students free their creativity and search for potential failure modes and their consequences. assess design safety Do you need to assess functional safety for each product development phase, ranging from the specification, to design, implementation, integration, verification, validation, and production release? Depending on the industry, specific standards need to be employed. We support most of the safety related activities leading to: - Provide a safety lifecycle (management, development, production, operation, service, decommissioning) and support tailoring the necessary activities during these lifecycle phases - Cover functional safety aspects of the entire development process - Provide an industry-specific risk-based approach for determining risk classes - Provide requirements for validation and confirmation measures to ensure a sufficient and acceptable level of safety is being achieved assess lead-free risks Due to the proliferation of lead-free solder alloys and the dearth of lead-free reliability data and modeling tools, taking care of the basics is of utmost importance to designers and product engineers having to build in long-term solder joint reliability. Let us support your risk reduction in: – Tin Whiskers – Reliability issues with Pb-free Alloys in COTS Electronics – Unpredictable Service Life & Reliability software - hardware interaction Specific hardware failures lead to different software anomalies. Let us perform the risk assessment of the hardware failures impact on system's software functionality. For example, we can make sure the software is capable to handle any short circuit between adjacent pins of a microprocessor or surrounding piece-parts. validate the use of a new technology* setting reliability targets* validate reliability targets' realism* validate design and technology choice* Starting from the early design phases, we strongly encourage you to assess the design’s reliability potential. Such, you will less expose your long-term business case to risks. Reliability predictions are useful to: - Assess the effect of product reliability on the maintenance activity and on the quantity of spare units required for acceptable field performance of any system. For example, predictions of the frequency of unit level maintenance actions can be obtained. Reliability prediction can be used to size spare populations. - Provide necessary input to system-level reliability models. System-level reliability models can subsequently be used to predict, for example, frequency of system outages in steady-state, frequency of system outages during early life, expected downtime per year, and system availability. - Provide necessary input to unit and system-level life cycle cost analyses. Life cycle cost studies determine the cost of a product over its entire life. Therefore, how often a unit will have to be replaced needs to be known. Inputs to this process include unit and system failure rates. This includes how often units and systems fail during the first year of operation as well as in later years. - Assist in deciding which product to purchase from a list of competing products. As a result, it is essential that reliability predictions be based on a common procedure. - Can be used to set factory test standards for products requiring a reliability test. Reliability predictions help determine how often the system should fail. - Are needed as input to the analysis of complex systems such as switching systems and digital cross-connect systems. It is necessary to know how often different parts of the system are going to fail even for redundant components. - Can be used in design trade-off studies. For example, a supplier could look at a design with many simple devices and compare it to a design with fewer devices that are newer but more complex. The unit with fewer devices is usually more reliable. - Can be used to set achievable in-service performance standards against which to judge actual performance and stimulate action Standard methods are available to allow predicting the FAILURE RATE . The predicted failure rate gives a feeling on the failures' frequency. For electronics, multiple methods are available. The most popular method remains the MIL-HDBK-217 methodology. Though obsolete and pessimists, it is the preferred one for safety critical applications. In a few words, it is considered that the worst case would be if the system that performs as per the predicted reliability. If is capable to withstand the safety requirements under such pessimist approach, any increased reliability performance would simply make it even safer to operate. MIL-HDBK-217 includes two methods of predicting the reliability: - Part Count Prediction, used to predict the reliability of a product during its development stage, - Part Stress Prediction Analysis, used when the product approaches the production phase. If your system is not safety critical or if you simply need to understand what the system is most likely to perform, we may suggest using the more recent developed FIDES approach. Though more complex as approach, the tool is capable to predict a more realistic prediction. Our lab has developed an interface that facilitates the use of this tool for large and complex electronic boards, providing both efficiency and data quality. Mechanical designs are often addressed by employing an appropriate data sources for part reliability. durability - integration of users variability A multi-step method leading to an optimum design that does not exceed the accepted risk ad avoids overdesigning. The method is considering the variability of the usage against the intrinsic reliability of the design. Take advantage of this stress-strength based method to optimally size the strength based on the demanded stress. Contact us for further details on either organization wide deploying this approach or assessing your design. * reliability validation by prediction

Testing

set test targets* build test plan and procedure* optimize testing* Reliability demonstration is the cornerstone of a reliability engineering program. A properly designed series of tests, particularly during the product's earlier design stages, can generate data to ensure the product meets the reliability requirements. This data is also useful in discovering the design issues in very early stages and improving it. Building a test plan is essential to the confidence in the results but also to minimize the associated costs. For any reliability test, two concerns need to be addressed: - statistical test aspects: number of cycles, sample size, acceleration conditions, extrapolations, selection of statistical model to employ, hypothesis testing, etc. - test representativeness: setting up a representative is always the challenge when moving from theory (statistics) to practice (test set-up). Tailored settings need to be considered when deciding to move on with a specific test: - operating conditions: e.g. humidity and conformal-coating, temperature cycles vs. constant temperature, dust, volcano ashes, vibration, etc. - rare events: icing for outside operated units, asphalt holes and sidewalks, etc. Based on the previously cumulated experience, we can always optimize a test plan either to increase the confidence in the results or to reduce the cost of the test. define environmental stress screen plan / highly accelerated stress screen** Environmental stress screening (ESS) refers to the process of exposing a newly manufactured or repaired product or component (typically electronic) to stresses such as thermal cycling and vibration in order to force latent defects to manifest themselves by permanent or catastrophic failure during the screening process. The surviving population, upon completion of screening, can be assumed to have a higher reliability than a similar unscreened population. Use our experience and set an ESS plan to reduce the risk of failure during the early life of the units. * design validation ** manufacturing validation

Operational

condition based maintenance & real time health monitoring Availability is your top priority, though cost is essential too. Unscheduled downtimes would kill your lean production, make you spend money on unused work force, delay your deliveries, etc. Rather than performing routine calendar-based inspections and component replacement, predictive techniques monitor equipment for pending failures and notify you when a part replacement is required. Sensors embedded in equipment check for abnormal conditions and trigger work orders when safe operating limits are breeched. When a predictive maintenance strategy is working effectively, maintenance is only performed on machines when it is required, thus reducing the parts and labor costs associated with replacements. With more and more systems shipping with Internet connectivity, the concept of predictive maintenance is likely to expand exponentially in the Internet of things*. The aim of CBM is to maintain the correct equipment at the right time. CBM is based on using real-time data to prioritize and optimize maintenance resources. Observing the state of the system is known as condition monitoring. Such a system will determine the equipment's health and act only when maintenance is actually necessary**. Development in recent years has allowed extensive instrumentation of equipment, and together with better tools for analyzing condition data, the maintenance personnel of today are more than ever able to decide when the right time to perform maintenance on some piece of equipment is. Ideally, CBM will allow the maintenance personnel to do only the right things, minimizing spare parts cost, system downtime and time spent on maintenance. One necessary action in achieving the above is to implement tailored monitoring systems designed to provide the actionable data necessary to fully implement application-specific condition-based maintenance strategies. Let us join our forces in a large project that will lead to a cost-effective maintenance. * extract from Improve maintenance with Internet of Things web page ** extract from Reliable plant web page reliability growth The concept of reliability growth is not just theoretical or absolute. Reliability growth is related to factors such as the management strategy toward taking corrective actions, effectiveness of the fixes, reliability requirements, the initial reliability level, reliability funding and competitive factors. Different management strategies may attain different reliability values with the same basic design. The effectiveness of the corrective actions is also relative when compared to the initial reliability at the beginning of testing. If corrective actions give a 400% improvement in reliability for equipment that initially had one tenth of the reliability goal, this is not as significant as a 50% improvement in reliability if the system initially had one half the reliability goal. In a formal reliability growth program, a reliability goal (or goals) is set and should be achieved during the development testing program with the necessary allocation or reallocation of resources. Therefore, planning and evaluating are essential factors in a growth process program. A comprehensive reliability growth program needs well-structured planning of the assessment techniques. A reliability growth program differs from a conventional reliability program in that there is a more objectively developed growth standard against which assessment techniques are compared. A comparison between the assessment and the planned value provides a good estimate of whether the program is progressing as scheduled or not. If the program does not progress as planned, then new strategies should be considered. For example, a re-examination of the problem areas may result in changing the management strategy so that more problem failure modes surfaced during the testing actually receive a corrective action instead of a repair*. *Reliability Growth Analysis reliability centered maintenance Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is a process to ensure that systems continue to do what their users require in their present operating context. It is generally used to achieve improvements in fields such as the establishment of safe minimum levels of maintenance. Successful implementation of RCM will lead to increase in cost effectiveness, Reliability, machine Uptime, and a greater understanding of the level of risk that the organization is managing. It is defined by the technical standard SAE JA1011, Evaluation Criteria for RCM Processes. RCM is a process to ensure that assets continue to do what their users require in their present operating context*. Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is a corporate level maintenance strategy that is implemented to optimize the maintenance program of a company or facility. The final result of an RCM program are the maintenance strategies that should be implemented on each of the assets of the facility**. There are four principles that are critical for an RCM program. 1.The primary objective is to preserve system function 2. Identify failure modes that can affect the system function 3. Prioritize the failure modes 4. Select applicable and effective tasks to control the failure modes Equipment reliability and availability, achieved by minimizing the probability of system failure is the focus of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). With this maintenance strategy, the function of the equipment is considered, and possible failure modes and their consequences are identified. Maintenance techniques that are cost-effective in minimizing the possibility of failure are then determined. The most effective techniques are then adopted to improve the reliability of the facility as a whole. * Reliability centered maintenance - Wikipedia **Reliability Centered Maintenance field data collection, personalized FRACAS A Failure Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action System (FRACAS) is a system, sometimes carried out using software, that provides a process for reporting, classifying, analyzing failures, and planning corrective actions in response to those failures. It is typically used in an industrial environment to collect data, record and analyse system failures. A FRACAS system may attempt to manage multiple failure reports and produces a history of failure and corrective actions. Failure Reporting, Analysis, and Corrective Action System (FRACAS) is a closed-loop feedback path in which the user and the supplier work together to collect, record, and analyze failures of both hardware and software data sets. The user captures predetermined types of data about all problems with a particular tool or software and submits the data to that supplier. A Failure Review Board (FRB) at the supplier site analyzes the failures, considering such factors as time, money, and engineering personnel. The resulting analysis identifies corrective actions that should be implemented and verified to prevent failures from recurring. Though in theory same steps are required (Failure Reporting, Analysis and Corrective Action System), a tailored implementation is always required. Such, both an optimized input time and accurate conclusion can be achieved at the same time.

Business risk assessment

assess Company's current reliability maturity Use an on-line quiz to assess the reliability maturity of your Company, cross-check the results with your Company's culture and build an optimized reliability program plan. Business risk assessment & cost FMEA An innovative approach that expands the force of the classical reliability tools to the business case level through a tailored analysis. A bottom up approach, describing what the financial impact of a specific failure is, allows an optimized classification of the failures and corrective actions A top-down approach, providing an analysis on how a business failure relies on physical or software failures, highlights the risk level and allows both maintenance optimization and system configuration updates. Join our efforts in continuously developing this new methodology and take full profit of the future results. process FMEA Process Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (PFMEA) is often developed at the time when a new product or process is being introduced. This activity is very beneficial when ordering tooling and equipment as well as determining process controls. PFMEA is a collection of possible causes and mechanisms for failure modes, as determined by a team. It can also play an important role in day to day improvement and problem solving. Based on a 10-step process, the PFMEA needs to: 1. Review the process — Use a process flowchart to identify each process component. 2. Brainstorm potential failure modes — Review existing documentation and data for clues. 3. List potential effects of failure — There may be more than one for each failure. 4. Assign Severity rankings — Based on the severity of the consequences of failure. 5. Assign Occurrence rankings — Based on how frequently the cause of the failure is likely to occur. 6. Assign Detection rankings — Based on the chances the failure will be detected prior to the customer finding it. 7. Calculate the RPN — Severity X Occurrence X Detection. 8. Develop the action plan — Define who will do what by when. 9. Take action — Implement the improvements identified by your PFMEA team. 10. Calculate the resulting RPN — Re-evaluate each of the potential failures once improvements have been made and determine the impact of the improvements. Except for step 9, let us provide you our high-quality analysis of your process. cultural shift to reliability It's commonly understood that safety in the workplace is a collective responsibility within an organization. But this wasn't always the case. Decades ago, safety was the responsibility of the safety department. Then "thought leaders" — those informed and innovative thinkers who inspire and enlighten us — realized how critical safety is to the success and sustainability of a manufacturing facility. Culture change ensued. In much the same way, reliability is now arcing its way along the path safety once took. The significance of reliability is making its way out of reliability departments and into corporate boardrooms. Many executives are beginning to realize that reliability is one of the most overlooked opportunities for growth. No manufacturing facility is 100-percent reliable. There is always some level of waste due to inefficiencies and unreliability. So, opportunities to improve exist, and these improvements can impact three key areas in which every organization wants to improve: customer loyalty, employee satisfaction and, of course, profitability. However, improvement is a journey that requires time, culture change and dedication to performance. There are no shortcuts, and the journey can never be completed without a commitment to continuous improvement. Today, an increasing focus on reliability is putting many forward-thinking organizations on the path to high-level performance and even higher profitability. The path begins with executive support and is marked by a company-wide shift in focus toward reliability. This shift in focus is what sets top organizations apart from others when an improvement initiative is undertaken. We support by organizing seminars and workshops in order to ease the cultural shift within your company. Our tailored presentations cover the life cycle of a program. Contact us for further details.

Safety

Assess safety level The system safety assessment provides an effective method for the identification, classification and mitigation of hazards. Generally accepted standards are MIL-STD-882 or SAE ARP 4761. Let us help you start with the initial assessment and identify the particular risks. System safety program A System Safety Program is intended to evaluate the safety aspects of an existing or proposed design and to highlight and issue to the stakeholders. Let us help you build an effective tailored safety process. STPA STPA ( System-Theoretic Process Analysis ) is a relatively new hazard analysis technique based on an extended model of accident causation. In addition to component failures, STPA assumes that accidents can also be caused by unsafe interactions of system components, none of which may have failed. Some of the advantages of STPA over traditional hazard/risk analysis techniques are that: - Very complex systems can be analyzed. “Unknown unknowns” that were previously only found in operations can be identified early in the development process and either eliminated or mitigated. Both intended and unintended functionality are handled. - Unlike the traditional hazard analysis methods, STPA can be started in early concept analysis to assist in identifying safety requirements and constraints. These can then be used to design safety (and security) into the system architecture and design, eliminating the costly rework involved when design flaws are identified late in development or during operations. As the design is refined and more detailed design decisions are made, the STPA analysis is also refined to help make more and more detailed design decisions. Complete traceability from requirements to all system artifacts can be easily maintained, enhancing system maintainability and evolution. - STPA includes software and human operators in the analysis, ensuring that the hazard analysis includes all potential causal factors in losses. - STPA provides documentation of system functionality that is often missing or difficult to find in large, complex systems. - STPA can be easily integrated into your system engineering process and into model-based system engineering. Many evaluations and comparisons of STPA to more traditional hazard analysis methods, such as fault tree analysis (FTA), failure modes and effects criticality analysis (FMECA), event tree analysis (ETA), and hazard and operability analysis (HAZOP) have been done. In all of these evaluations, STPA found all the causal scenarios found by the more traditional analyses, but it also identified many more, often software-related and non-failure, scenarios that the traditional methods did not find. In some cases, where there had been an accident that the analysts had not been told about, only STPA found the cause of the accident. In addition, STPA turned out to be much less costly in terms of time and resources than the traditional methods.

Expand your R&D

Follow 4 simple steps:

1. Identify your need. Use any generic topic listed at RAMS activities or define your specific need.

2. Partner with Concordia's Faculty Members and access one of the many possibilities to increase your R&D activities.

3. Pick your most effective solution:
- R&D grant: various forms, 1 or multiple students for 6 to 18 months projects
- partner with Concordia and another Company for a multi-Company or international R&D grant: various forms, 1 or multiple students for 6 to 18 months projects
- ENGR 6971/6981 Project courses: get 1 graduate student for a 4 months project. See here more details.
- CAPSTONE: 5 to 7 of our best undergraduate students for a 2 semesters project. Check Concordia's CAPSTONE page for more details.

4. Get the project done.


For more details, please contact us.

GCS RAMS Certificate

Feedback on previous event:

Reliability, Availability and Safety at Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science

Past activities and feedback

Montréal RAMS Specialists' Hub

Our final goal is to support the local economy to improve competitiveness and to acquire world-wide recognition. To achieve this goal, we strongly believe that non-competitive experience sharing can be beneficial and that various Industry domains can learn from each other. For example, due to its extremely safety regulated environment, the Aerospace Industry should be the best choice to share expertise with any non-Aerospace Industry willing to excel in product safety.

The RAMS Center at Concordia University is the perfect common ground to gather around recognized Experts from various local Industries. Their regular meetings will be an excellent opportunity for experience exchanges and the expertise sharing contributes to the implementation of the most added-value tools and to the development of new methods.

The intent is to also establish international relationships with recognized RAMS experts across the world, exchanges experiences and observes international trends.


This initiative is developed in close partnership with SREMONTREAL.ORG: Montreal Chapter of the Society of Reliability Engineers.

MMRS: Mtbf Montreal Recommended Students

As Professors, we know our students: we meet them in class for 13 weeks, we interact with them by projects, assignments, exams, etc., so we can identify the best fitted student to your needs. If you need a student to hire or for a project (e.g. internship, CAPSTONE, etc.), please contact us.

Universities need to prepare students for a world that, in many ways, will be dramatically different from today’s. Providing a next-generation education means grounding students in the academic fundamentals while providing them with the kinds of skills and knowledge that will prepare them for the emerging demands of work, citizenship, and life. Students learn more, finish their degrees at higher rates, and are more likely to achieve positive life outcomes when they are highly engaged at university*.

Experiential learning is one of the most effective forms of engagement. It provides students with complex, collaborative tasks and projects that test their conceptual knowledge against experience and situate their learning in real-world contexts. More hands-on opportunities for students complement and extend what happens in classrooms, providing transformative learning experiences that encourage students’ civic involvement and enhance their career readiness*.