Fast-tracking reliability testing in production

08/07/2026  HBK - Hottinger, Bruel & Kjaer

For manufacturers of industrial food packaging machinery, developing complex, repairable systems presents significant technical challenges. High-performance equipment - such as filling machines, downstream equipment, and automation systems - must meet demanding reliability expectations in the field.

As these systems undergo continuous upgrades, redesigns and corrective actions, traditional validation testing alone is no longer sufficient to maintain confidence in performance outcomes. Engineering teams often struggle to find a structured, repeatable framework to track failures, plan test durations, and consistently evaluate reliability growth across multiple development phases.

To address these industry challenges, the packaging manufacturer embedded a structured Reliability Growth Programme directly into its development workflow, utilising ReliaSoft Weibull++ Reliability Growth software as the analytical backbone of the process.

The software enabled its engineering teams to plan reliability growth tests well in advance, including estimating required test durations and setting target Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) parameters before physical testing even began. During execution, the software was used to record, classify, and analyse failure events consistently across various test phases, ensuring a highly traceable and robust improvement cycle.

The integration of this software-supported methodology has delivered significant operational and analytical efficiencies. The development team has gained continuous visibility into achieved reliability compared with planned expectations throughout the test execution. MTBF can now be evaluated at each test phase with confidence bounds applied directly to the measured data, enabling engineers to demonstrate that reliability targets have been met at a much earlier stage in the cycle.

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