During the last year or so I've heard a lot of people asking, "How can I calculate B10 life in Minitab?" Despite my being a statistician and an industrial engineer (mind you, one who's never actually been in the field) and having taken a reliability engineering course, I'd never heard of B10 life. So I did some research.

The B10 life metric originated in the ball-and-roller bearing industry but has become a metric used across a variety of industries. It's particularly useful in establishing warranty periods. The "BX" or "Bearing Life" nomenclature, which refers to the time at which a percentage of items in a population will fail, speaks to these roots.

So then, B10 life is the time at which 10 percent of units in a population will fail. Alternatively, you can think of it as the 90-percent reliability of a population at a specific point in its lifetime—or the point in time when an item has a 90-percent probability of survival. The B10 life metric's popularity among ball-and-roller bearing makers was due to the industry's strict requirement that no more than 10 percent of bearings in a given batch fail by a specific time due to fatigue failure.

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