Dianna Deeney interviews Adam Bahret about reliability engineering during design: how product design engineers and product development leadership can incorporate reliability engineering.

This interview is part of our series, “A Chat with Cross Functional Experts". Our focus is speaking with people that are typically part of a cross-functional team within engineering projects. We discuss their viewpoints and perspectives regarding new products, the values they bring to new product development, and how they're involved and work with product design engineering teammates.

About Adam

Adam Bahret is the founder of Apex Ridge Consulting and a leading reliability expert who writes, speaks and coaches executive teams on reliability as a competitive edge. His reliability-culture change program has delivered millions in savings for clients while mitigating risk and forming a foundation for reliability-fueled growth and brand dominance. His clients range across multiple industry segments, including medical devices, robotics, semiconductor, aerospace, consumer, and automotive.

Adam works with technical teams to improve the design while mentoring leadership teams in adopting the processes, language, and behaviors to build a reliability culture. He also introduces key reliability metrics such as “time-to-reliability” that guide organizational thinking and build a robust reliability culture that’s the hallmark of dominant top-performing technology companies.

Adam has deep technical expertise and over 25 years of experience in product development and reliability engineering. He has an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University, is an ASQ nationally certified reliability engineer, and an international speaker on technology, leadership, and product development. More information on Adam and Apex Ridge can be found at www.apexridge.com.

Adam and Dianna talk about:

• What "time to reliability" is, and how it can be used to measure the completeness of a project instead of other metrics, like date of prototype release.
• How naming problems helps others identify with it and provides an avenue to solve and measure results.
• The trap of not incentivizing reliability leadership metrics.
• The mindset shift needed by product design engineers to design for reliability.
• How Reliability Engineers can be an advisor, not opposition.
• Things teams can do to avoid being traumatized by FMEA.

Visit the podcast blog for additional information and links, including a list of Adam's books.

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About meDianna Deeney helps engineers work with their cross-functional team to reduce concept design time and increase product success, using quality and reliability methods. She founded Quality during Design through her company Deeney Enterprises, LLC. Her vision is a world of products that are easy to use, dependable, and safe – possible by using Quality during Design engineering and product development.