Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE) Exam

Who Should Take This Exam?

• Enhance their careers: The CRE certification showcases your expertise in reliability engineering, potentially leading to better career opportunities or promotions.
• Demonstrate skills: Validate your knowledge to employers and colleagues, proving your understanding of reliability principles and practices.
• Advance in reliability engineering: This certification serves as a stepping stone for further specialization within the reliability engineering field.

Prerequisites

Roles and Responsibilities

• Reliability Engineer: Analyze, design, and implement solutions to improve product or system reliability throughout the lifecycle.
• Product Reliability Engineer: Focuses on ensuring product reliability during the design, development, and manufacturing stages.
• Maintainability Engineer: Designs and implements strategies to improve the ease and efficiency of maintaining products or systems.
• Quality Engineer: Integrates reliability principles and practices into overall quality management processes.

Exam Details

• Exam Provider: American Society for Quality (ASQ)
• Format: Computer-based exam with multiple-choice questions
• Number of Questions: Typically 150 scored questions (with 15 unscored pretest questions) - subject to change
• Duration: 4 hours and 18 minutes 
• Passing Score: generally around 70%

Course Outline

• Benefits of reliability engineering
• Interrelationship of safety, quality, and reliability
• Reliability engineer leadership responsibilities
• Reliability engineer role and responsibilities in the product life cycle 
• Function of reliability in engineering
• Ethics in reliability engineering
• Supplier reliability assessments
• Performance monitoring

• Basic reliability terminology
• Drivers of reliability requirements and targets
• Corrective and preventive action (CAPA)
• Root cause analysis
• Product life-cycle engineering stages
• Economics of product maintainability and availability
• Cost of poor reliability
• Six Sigma methodologies
• Systems engineering and integration

• Risk management techniques
• Types of risk

• Fault tree analysis (FTA)
• Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA)
• Common mode failure analysis
• Hazard analysis
• System safety

• Identify appropriate risk mitigation (treatment) plans to include controls that will minimize risk and subsequent impact in terms of safety, liability, and regulatory compliance.

• Firstly, Basic statistics
• Next, Basic probability concepts
• Probability Distribution
• Probability functions
• Sampling plans for statistics and reliability testing
• Statistical process control (SPC) and process capability studies (Cp, Cpk): 
• Confidence and tolerance intervals

• Sources and uses of reliability data
• Types of data
• Data collection methods
• Data summary and reporting
• Failure analysis methods
• Failure reporting, analysis, and corrective action system (FRACAS)

• Reliability test strategies
• Environmental and conditions of use factors
• Failure consequence
• Failure criteria.

• Firstly, Describe the purpose, advantages, and limitations of each of the following types of tests, and use common models to develop test plans, evaluate risks, and interpret test results.
• Secondly, Accelerated life tests
• Stress screening
• Next, Qualification/Demonstration testing
• Degradation (wear-to-failure) testing
• Software testing

• Reliability block diagrams and models
• Physics of failure and failure mechanisms
• Failure models
• Reliability prediction methods
• Design prototyping

• Stress-strength analysis
• Design of experiments (DOE)
• Reliability optimization
• Human factors
• Design for X (DFX)
• Design for Reliability (DfR)

• Materials and components selection techniques
• Parts standardizationand system simplification.

• Maintenance strategies
• Preventive maintenance (PM) analysis
• Corrective maintenance analysis