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Life Cycle Reliability Engineering by Guangbin Yang. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2007, x + 517 pp, $125.00.
Reviewer: William Meeker, Department of Statistics, 304C Snedecor Hall, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011-1210.
THIS is a useful and an important book. It should be on the shelf of all reliability engineers and other engineers who have responsibility for product reliability. It will also be of interest to many of those doing research in the area. The book is broad, covering topics ranging from customer expectations and QFD to the details of how to plan an accelerated life test.
To achieve high reliability, you first have to achieve high quality. Then you must turn your focus to maintaining high quality over time. Thus reliability can be thought of as "the other dimension of quality" (Meeker and Escobar 2004). A number of years ago I was working with an engineer on a reliability problem. In conversation he said "Reliability used to be so easy; now it is hard." That surprised me. By that time we had much better reliability technology including better statistical models, physics-of-failure models, software for reliability data analysis and reliability planning, etc. So, I asked "Why?" His answer was "Competition. Today we have to keep costs to a bare minimum and are unable to use the large 'factors of safety' and gold-plating that made it easy to provided high reliability in the past." Of course, he was right on the mark. Over the years, since I had that conversation, I have witnessed (as a consumer, as a consultant, and in the news) numerous reliability disasters that were caused by some combination of engineering mistakes, use of inferior parts or materials to reduce cost, and a desire to rush to market without adequate testing or other reliability assurance measures.
In the past, few companies had any kind of formal reliability program. Instead they designed their products, used an appropriate amount of conservatism, and few problems arose. Generally, it is possible to design a lower-cost product that will be highly reliable, but it has to be done carefully and this can be done consistently only if there is an appropriate reliability process or program. I frequently, when working with my biased sample of companies...