Kramarchuk lectures on product assurance as part of Ukrainian engineers' lecture series (02/22/04)

Kramarchuk lectures on product assurance as part of Ukrainian engineers' lecture series

NEW YORK - The Ukrainian Engineers' Society of New York City on December 17, 2003, presented a lecture by Bohdan Kramarchuk, manager for product assurance and performance management at ITT Avionics, on "Product Assurance - Reliability Engineering and Quality Control."

Speaking at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York City, Mr. Kramarchuk delivered an informative and concisely structured presentation on the broad field of reliability engineering and the related quality control disciplines. He began with a historical perspective of this subject, starting with statistical process control at the Bell Telephone Co. in the 1930s and continuing with the Japanese thrust, assisted by American industrial engineering and management techniques, into Total Quality Control in the 1950s and 1960s.

Mr. Kramarchuk explained in precise detail how reliability engineering is a professional discipline that combines key concepts in statistics and engineering with the objective of quantitatively evaluating, measuring, forecasting, improving the reliability of products and processes, and reducing failure rates and hazard rates. An initial overview of general concepts, such as the "Bathtub Curve," which showed the progression from the initial phase of manufacturing defects to the steady state of useful life to the final stage of wearout failures, set the stage for a broad review of reliability statistics which included the Weibull, Exponential, Log-Normal, and Gaussian (Normal) distributions.

With the audience actively participating in the lively presentation, Mr. Kramarchuk brought in actual examples of product and systems failures, addressing current and topical questions such as: Why do Japanese make better quality cars than Americans? Why didn't our engineering systems prevent the recent Challenger shuttle disaster? Why do our "smart" bombs sometimes fall on friendly forces? Why do our medical institutions kill thousands of patients unnecessarily each year?

Basic quality control tools - such as process flow diagrams, run charts, check sheets pareto diagrams, cause and effect diagrams, brainstorming approaches and histograms were explained and illustrated. Mr. Kramarchuk emphasized the importance of testing and detailed various accelerated testing programs. He further outlined several advanced quality tools such as control charts, failure modes and effects, fault tree analysis, taguchi methodology and scatter diagrams.

Mr. Kramarchuk concluded by underscoring the importance of total commitment and involvement of everyone in a quality control and performance improvement process.

Throughout his presentation, Mr. Kramarchuk used levity and humor to keep the audience engaged in a topic that at times became very technical and scientific.

The evening finished with informal and convivial discussions over food and drinks.

This was the second in a series of engineering and scientific lectures presented by the Ukrainian Engineers' Society of New York City during the 2003-2004 year. The next lecture will be presented on Tuesday, March 2, by Petro Halatyn president of New Jersey based KDM Aero Inc., on "Optimal Estimation."

The Ukrainian Engineers' Society of America (UESA) is an association of technical/scientific professionals and students, including engineers, scientists, architects and businesspeople. Its mission is to help advance our members' professions, foster interest in technical and economic issues in Ukraine, and provide a social and professional network of mutual support. To learn more about UESA, visit the website at www.uesa.org or write to UESA, 2 E. 79th Street, New York, NY 10021.

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