Introduction
In this work , reliability engineering and its importance are defined and established, as well as the relationship between various concepts involved and inherent to reliability, which is directly related to the quality of processes and products.
Reliability is a technique that allows studying the useful life of products throughout the supply chain, this concept arises as a result of the Second World War with the purpose that the soldiers' weapons would not have any fault.
Reliability engineering involves probabilistic concepts, that is why one of the sections of this research is addressed and interrelated concepts of probability with reliability. The knowledge of all these concepts manages to consolidate the success of the company through the application of efficient reliability engineering, as well as the main application formulas in reliability.
New contributions in software for the study, analysis and presentation of reliability today are also presented.
Background of Reliability Engineering
Immediately after the Second World War, the presence and use of reliability intensified, mainly between the years 1940 and 1950; But the issue of reliability began during the world war, since reliability was used to perform the calculations of the resources necessary for the maintenance of the equipment, which was applied to calculate the total of spare parts that were needed to maintain equipment. electronics, armaments, electrical and mechanical instruments in relation to their lifetime (duration of the same).
Years later, specifically in the 50's, with the need to perform calculations regarding the movement of space travel and the use of satellites among others, the need to develop and implement reliability increased. In the decade of the 70's the oil crisis occurred, it was during this time the world shook and it is when the Japanese began to adopt and generally implement quality and reliability issues that were applied in companies for their products, processes and services.
Currently, organizations are immersed in highly globalized and therefore competitive markets, in which reliability is no longer taken as an innovation but is implemented as an application need that the organization must have to remain in the competitive market.
What is Reliability Engineering?
To better understand the term reliability engineering, we will proceed to define the following concepts to achieve a better understanding of the subject.
Engineering: To speak of this term is to refer to a discipline that provides methods, techniques and tools for solving real problems that arise in everyday life, whether in a company, at school and in general to any type of organization (Salvador., 2003).
Reliability: Reliability applied to engineering has proven over the years its efficiency in the results obtained for the anticipation of operation failures found in companies or organizations. For this verification, field tests have had to be developed applying statistics; This is how production problems can be prevented through reliability tools, which allow having a product, or machinery, among other things, durable and with quality.
Then then we can determine according to the above that talking about reliability is to emphasize the probability that a machinery, product works according to its specifications within an established period of time taking into account the conditions specified from the beginning; Reliability is a branch of engineering, which is based on the statistical resource, within which the required tools are used to be able to make an analysis or evaluation of: the improvements, the design, the forecast, and the maintenance of the machines, processes and / or products that organizations offer to customers, which all previous concepts require control and measurement in order to reduce all costs, and therefore increase profits and obtain customer satisfaction.
In the estimation of a system, four phases of reliability study are required which are: (Acuña, Reliability Engineering, 2003).
Within quality there are a series of concepts that are directly involved with reliability and are:
Quality control (in processes)
It can be defined as a procedure in relation to the controls in terms of quality of the manufactured products, as well as the resources for its process (raw materials); with the main purpose of preventing the presence of errors or altering the elaboration of the product and in this way the main task is not fulfilled. And the contribution of this in the reliability lies in the prevention of defects that later become problems in the use of the manufactured product.
Concurrent engineering
It refers to all the activities or tasks of a work team that has broad disciplines in its procedures and that is why through a design parallel to the production process, whose contribution to reliability consists of identifying the failures from the origin of the production process and its manufacturing design.
Concurrent engineering (CE) is specifically based on an approach that allows simultaneity in the manufacture of the product and its production process.
CE can be defined as “the systemic approach for the simultaneous and integrated design of products and the processes that are related to each other, within them can be included: manufacturing and support services, with the firm objective that those involved In the process, take as soon as during the beginning of a project all the elements of the life cycle of the product, that is, consider from its birth to its end, considering elements such as quality, cost, planning and user requirements ”(Albin & Crefeld, 1994).
Concurrent engineering improves production processes that are carried out under a traditional approach through the application of the following concepts (García Flores, 2004):
- A computational architecture that allows the optimal scheduling of tasks and the management of information flows A unified representation of the design and manufacture of information A set of computational tools that optimally and intelligently develop prototypes.
Quality function deployment
It is a process through which the planning of a product and the procedures for its elaboration are carried out according to the requirements of the clients, that is why it is known by many as “the voice that represents the clients”.
Among the main benefits of the deployment of the quality function are:
- Decrease in product planning times Fewer changes in product engineering issues Consistency of product design and customer requirements Fulfill customer requirements Convert customer needs into achievable elements Motivate improved communications and employee performance Result to support the management area in matters of direction and results orientation Recognizes and identifies the critical elements for the quality corresponding to the product and its development within the markets.
The Deployment of the quality function approach is one of the keys to achieve continuous improvement, it translates what the customer wants while the organization produces. Quality Function Deployment allows the organization to get ahead of the customer and surprise him.
To design the matrix for the deployment of the quality function “QFD”, the following steps must be followed:
- Identify the client or user Establish the quality requirements in the good or service Establish the importance of the QUE'S (of the client) Establish the activities COMO's (PROCESSES) Analyze the relationship of the QUE'S and HOW's Establish the objectives of each process Evaluate technical difficulties in the achievement of objectives Evaluate the achievement of objectives of the tasks and processes Establish importance of the process tasks
The purpose of the matrices for the deployment of the quality function is basically to establish the requirements and techniques necessary to meet the customer's needs, the manufacturing processes and quality controls, as well as the specifications for the final product.
Failure
Event that occurs in a product or process which are defects and are unproductive, thus impacting the costs of an organization. This is where reliability comes in, since it is responsible for detecting sources of failure to establish controls over them. The fault function is: F (t).
Failures cause unproductive actions that are reflected in the cost and productive behavior of the system. Failures can be caused by external or internal agents of the production process, returning to the example of automobile lines, failures are produced by internal agents that forget to consider external agents to the product.
Failure reason
These are measured with the change either of damaged units that have failed or of failed units that have not done so in a period of time, their function is denoted by l (t).
It is the ratio of change of the number of units that have failed in the laboratory tests, between the number of units that have not failed and have survived the test during a period of time. This rate of change is desirable to be close to zero.
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
It is the arithmetic mean of failures that exist in a process or product, which is assumed to be repaired immediately. MTBF = 1 / l.
Mean time to restore (MTTR)
It is the average time of restoration of the function of an equipment, machine, line or process, after having presented a functional failure. To obtain the MTTR, we divide the total repair time by the total number of system failures (Edinn, 2011).
Redundancy
Redundancy highlights the existence of more than one way to perform a function, that is, everyone has their own way and style of doing things, a clear example of redundancy is the function of making cereal, there are those who first put the cereal and then milk, or there are those who put milk and then cereal, they are two different ways, but the function is the same.
Availability
It is the probability that a product works normally at any point in time.
Useful life
It is the estimated duration of a product or service can have, as long as it fulfills and is used correctly for the function for which it was performed.
Life cycle of a product
The determination of the quality values related to the client's requirements is carried out from four levels or stages that together form a
reliability analysis, the stages are as follows:
- Concept and feasibility stage Detailed design stage Prototype stage Pilot test stages Stage of changes in product or its design
Reliability formulas
Reliability function. Reliability is determined from this function.
R (t) = Reliability Pr = Probability.
T = continuous random variable. t = Period of time.
Software reliability engineering
Software reliability engineering is a tool in organizations that offers the possibility of planning and guiding software processes in a quantitative way. It is not really of current creation, rather it arose in the seventies from the contributions of: JD Musa and Okumoto. The effectiveness of ICS is really high and that is why companies such as HP, IBM, Motorola, Microsoft and many more have made use of it.
ICS is distinguished by the following two elements:
• The expected utilization in relation to the functionality of the system.
• Needs in terms of quality established by the client.
Software Reliability Engineering Process
The software reliability engineering process is defined from six activities which:
- Defining the product Developing an operating profile Establishing the right accounting Preparing the tests Executing the tests Processing and directing the tests
Below you can see an outline with the linked activities for your better understanding.
There is currently a large amount of software for the reliability study, below is a diagram with the main ones:
Implementation of a reliability engineering plan in Grupo Súper Aldi SA de CV
objective
Implement a reliability engineering plan in Grupo Súper ALDI SA de CV, in order to identify existing flaws in the processes of buying and selling merchandise and its inventories, to improve its processes and sales rotation and maximize profits..
conclusion
In the current era, it is very important for organizations to prepare a study and analysis of risks that may arise and achieve presence in the production of a product or service, and at the same time, analyze in detail the failures that arise during the supply chain. supplies for the life of the same.
An organization that perfectly implements reliability engineering will provide its customers with high quality products, which it can guarantee for life.
Reliability gives customers confidence in their suppliers, and in turn gives suppliers or producers satisfied customers.
The analysis of the life cycle of the product or process is important for reliability, since in each of these stages the failure or risk can occur, and with this disappear from the market. Finally, a good use of reliability engineering grants management a reduction in production costs, since if you detect the failure of a product before it goes to market, you save the loss of prestige, and the costs of returning the product. commodity; at the same time a decrease in times, for the same reason above, if you detect the failure of the system you can correct and achieve an optimum, otherwise you will always work overcoming it.
1. Quality Function Deployment (QFD).
Bibliography
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