ENMA 6050:
Reliability, Failure Analysis, and Risk Assessment
Course Description
Thanks to approaches such as
statistical process control, total quality management, and most recently design
for six sigma, the past decades have seen tremendous
improvements in product, process, and system quality and reliability. Yet somehow, things still seem to go wrong,
and sometimes in a very big way – see the examples of spectacular failures
summarized at: http://www.technologyforge.net/wgtgb.
As a core course in Marquette
University’s MS –
Engineering Management program, ENMA 6050 provides students with a broad
overview of why good things go bad.
Students are provided with a toolbox of commonly applied reliability,
failure analysis, and risk assessment tools, including:
-
Process flow diagrams - Fishbone diagrams
-
Human factors analysis - Root cause analysis
-
Fault tree analysis
- Failure
mode and effects analysis (FMEA)
Industry/business-sponsored
student team projects provide the mechanism for students to apply these tools
to real-world problems.
This course places special
attention on management issues related to failure in large, complex systems,
with case studies providing students with examples of how management can
contribute to or preferably minimize reliability issues. Students are also exposed to classical
statistics-based elements of quality and reliability, including failure
distributions, Kano and Taguchi approaches, and statistical process control.
In addition to being a core
course in the MS – Engineering management program, this course applies toward
the New Product and Process Development certificate.