Reliability Engineering: Value, Waste, and Costs

Abstract

Several reliability engineering activities practised today cannot contribute to the primary objective of reliability engineering, which is the prevention of failure. Lean Thinking (or lean) is well‐known as management philosophy with the objective of maximising value by removal of waste from all activities. Can lean be applied to reliability engineering? This paper starts with a brief discussion on the fundamentals of both reliability engineering and lean. It provides a definition of value in the context of reliability engineering, and applies this definition to identify categories of reliability engineering activities which can be considered as waste. The paper concludes with a discussion on reliability costs.

Increasing System Reliability by Applying Conceptual Modeling and Data Analysis—A Case Study: An Automated Parking System

“…Proactive reliability engineering occurs during design and development, emphasizing failure prevention. In contrast, reactive reliability engineering occurs during production, especially during maintenance and operations, emphasizing failure management [7,19]. Figure 2 visualizes these two types of reliability engineering: proactive and reactive reliability engineering.…”