GS947: Advanced Production/Operations Management

General Instructions: This is an exercise of how well you use concepts and principles when you
analyze – so use the theories, concepts, and principles covering the course as much as you can.
Answers based on common sense and stock knowledge will not help you even if what you say is
true. You will need to show me how well you reason analytically. So make sure that everything
you do is accompanied by an explanation of why you did it.
1. Define:
a. Maintenance vs. Reliability
b. Mean Time Between Failures
c. Learning Curve
d. Tactics to improve reliability
e. Excellence
2. The semiconductor used in Samsung has 5 circuits, each of which has its own reliability rate.
Component 1 has a reliability of 0.90; component 2, 0.95; component 3, 0.98; component 4, 0.90;
and component 5, 0.99. What is the reliability of one semiconductor?
R= (.90)(.95)(.98)(.90)(.99)
=0.7465689
3. Refer to (1). A recent engineering change in Samsung places a backup component in each of
the two least reliable transistor circuit, of the same reliability level. What is the reliability of the
new system?
4. Apple subjected 100 iPhone Xs to 5,000 hours of testing. Halfway through testing, 5 iPhone Xs
failed. What was the failure rate in terms of the following:
a. Percentage of failures?
b. Number of failures per unit-hour?
c. Number of failures per unit-year?
d. If 1,100 people receive iPhone Xs, how many units can we expect to fail during the
following year? e. Compute for MTBF. Interpret.
5. A testing process at Boeing Aircraft has 400 components in series. The average reliability of
each component is 99.5%. Find the reliability of the whole testing process.