Thomas Reiter - Graduate Physicist

  Reliability Analysis, Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) Analysis

Hello, I'm Thomas

I'm a graduate physicist from universtity of Stuttgart (Germany) with specialization on semiconductor physics and analog & digital measurement technology.
I also completed a one-year full-time course in quality management, before working many years as a quality engineer in the robotics, automotive, and medical sector.
Through the years I have more and more specialized in reliability engineering and general statistics, and finally became a reliability & functional safety professional covering various services, of which I now offer these two worldwide:

• MTBF information (non-profit)
• MTBF calculation service (profit)

I have completed more than a thousand MTBF calculation projects and probably a hundred MTBF training sessions in many industries.
If bills of material are available, which is typically the case, I would use a world-wide recognised MTBF calculation standard. This is straight forward, and requires only minimal contribution from customers, basically providing the bills of material and answering several questions.
But even if bills of material are unavailable, which is at least partly  the case in about 10% of  the projects, I have several fall-back methods in reserve that would still produce reliable and valid MTBF figures.

Even for mechanical equipment, for which no MTBF calculation standards exist, not only can I provide solutions that would produce reasonable MTBF figures, but also give you the neccessary background and confidence to sell it to your customer.
If field failure data is your primary data source, then be careful: Just dividing cumulative operating time by # of fails is dangerous because it would produce optimistic MTBF.

I also offer some courses for self-study, which currently are available only in German. However, I plan to translate them into English in the future.

• MTBF (100 pages)
• Design of Experiments (400 pages, with many Excel templates)
• Statistical Process control (400 pages, with many Excel templates)

Thanks for reading,
Thomas