Reliability Coaching from Trusted Advisors

Accelerating the Reliability Learning Curve

Do you need to accelerate your company’s reliability knowledge and application of the best proven reliability assessment and development techniques?

Experienced leaders in the field of Reliability Engineering can provide an adaptive and cost effective solution to your reliability goals without adding additional headcount. We can be there guiding and coaching on the best techniques when you need us whether for a many hours a day or a few hours a week.

Benefits of Coaching and Mentoring

In addition to providing custom reliability education, FMS Reliability offers experienced coaching and mentoring to individuals and teams. Coaching and mentoring can increase the effectiveness of training by reinforcing the lessons learned as students look to apply their newly gained knowledge. Coaching is also useful for specific professional development needs, such as dealing more effectively with vendors and design teams.

Coaching can have a positive impact on your organization’s overall reliability program by helping management gain tools that enable them to calculate the value of reliability to the organization. Coaching can also help your company build a corporate culture that embraces reliability.

• Accelerate your learning curve
• Get results from your reliability program
• Improve product reliability and improve customer satisfaction
• Create value with each reliability task
• Enable your organization to create reliable products

Overview

Implementing a reliability program within an organization or with a product design team has a myriad of choices. Building a plan, considering the most valuable next steps, and improving product reliability all at the same time can overwhelm even the best teams. Working with a experienced reliability professional as a coach provides a cost effective way to both get results and learn the finer points of reliability engineering and management.

Reliability coaching provide timely guidance and recommendations tailored to your situation. Learning that occurs just in time provide both immediate value and improved learning for the team. Also, a coach can help to keep the long term program improvements in mind as the daily priorities continue to demand attention. Additionally, our experience with working with many products, technologies and people will assist you to rapidly overcome the range of challenges a focus on reliability improve presents.

How we work with you

A common scenario is to meet and discuss the objectives of your reliability improvement initiative. Also to conduct a reliability assessment to determine your organizations capabilities and current practices. The visit also provides a chance to meet directly with the individuals that will receive the coaching (an individual or small team that are implementing the reliability program improvement).

We like to arrange for regular weekly one hour teleconference to discuss current status, next steps and to provide training and guidance. These meetings are discussions that steadily work to build confidence in the team and step towards achieving improved reliability with your products.

• We listen to you and ask questions.
• We review and comment on current and planned activities.
• We encourage taking steps to build your knowledge and program.
• We advise on best practices for you as a professional and for your reliability program.
• We have experience and are willing to share that with you in the program.

You have a few options how to work with us. The three tiers are separated by communication method and scope.

A site visit and program assessment is optional yet highly recommended for the Strategic option. If you want to make significant changes across your organization, enabling us to know your organizations goals, strengths, and weaknesses, permits us to focus and guide you and your team efficiently.

We can setup the coaching program to last any duration, and have found that 6 months is long enough to make significant improvement. Of course this is flexible and may work to map along with your product development cycle or business cycle.

Coaches

Kirk Gray

Kirk Gray has over 35 years of experience in the electronics manufacturing industry beginning in 1978 installing and servicing high vacuum semiconductor capital equipment.

In 1989 he was the ESS Process Engineering Manager  at Storage Technology in Colorado and worked and was mentored by their internal consultant Dr. Gregg K. Hobbs, the creator of the HALT and HASS methods. He continued working with Gregg at his newly formed HALT chamber company Qualmark in 1992.

Kirk has 12 years consulting in applied methods for accelerated stress testing. He created Accelerated Reliability Solutions in 2010 to guide and coach electronics manufacturers on accelerated reliability testing and screening. He has presented webinars, seminars and workshops on the theory and application of HALT and HASS processes to numerous companies worldwide.

Mr. Gray is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Senior Collaborator with the University of Maryland’s CALCE (Center for Advance Life Cycle Engineering) Consortium.

He is a charter member and past Chairman of the IEEE/CPMT Technical Committee on Accelerated Stress Testing and Reliability (ASTR) helping to organize the annual IEEE Workshops  on ASTR.

He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in1982.

Fred Schenkelberg

Fred is a reliability engineering and management consultant with FMS Reliability, with areas of focus including reliability engineering management, training, and accelerated life testing. Fred is able to bring the experience of over 100 design and maintenance programs to your team.

He is spearheading the No MTBF movement and encourages you participation. Previously, he co-founded and built the HP corporate reliability program documenting over $100 million in savings. He is a lecturer with the University of Maryland teaching a graduate level course on reliability engineering management.

He earned a master of science degree in statistics at Stanford University in 1996.  He earned his bachelors degrees in Physics at the United State Military Academy in 1983.

Fred is an active volunteer with a few reliability focused professional organization and most proud of the ASQ Reliability Division Webinar program and the reliability calendar programs. He is an CRE and CQE.

Next Steps

Contact us to discuss getting started.

Kirk Gray – (512) 554-3111 or email

Fred Schenkelberg – (408) 710-8248 or email

We look forward to working with you and your team to make significant improvements in your reliability program and results.