Mika Kiviniemi, Project Manager at ABB’s Quality and Reliability Laboratory in Helsinki, describes how combining data analytics with physics-based stress testing enables industries to anticipate and prevent serious failures in motion systems.
A global reliability ecosystem
ABB treats reliability as a core discipline built over decades, backed by tools and a global network of facilities. At the heart of this effort is a dedicated 6,000m² testing and reliability campus in Helsinki, Finland. With more than €100 million of investment, it is one of the most advanced environments in the world dedicated to understanding how drives and motors age, degrade and eventually fail, bringing together extensive test infrastructure and specialist engineering expertise.
Reliability engineering needs to treat failure as a deliberate study in order to move beyond guesswork. Instead of waiting for faults, at the Helsinki facility, engineers recreate harsh operating conditions under controlled circumstances. They push products until they break, observe exactly how they behave along the way, and then dissect the result to understand what went wrong and why.
Read the full article in DPA's April 2026 issue