Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Quality during Design is the place for product designers to use quality thinking throughout the design process to create products others love, for less.
Viewing Quality as a strategic asset to new product development can help us create those products that others love, for less. We talk about some challenges with new product development, the ideal state, and how we can use quality to get there. Use quality engineering and reliability engineering to P.R.U.N.E. the development process so we can develop the best products that we can.
This fourth episode of the “QDD Versus” series focuses on concepts relating to Design for Manufacturability. Understand how design specs fit into process control, process capability, and SPC and where they typically don’t fit at all.
We talk about things to think about when setting limits on design features.
And, when defining controls for potential failures, knowing how processes are controlled can help us decide if the controls we have are good enough or not.
We talk about customers of design information. It takes many people to realize a product design into something that can be sold and used. Those people need design information to ensure that they’re performing their tasks to produce a high-quality product, and to be able to use our product appropriately. We review who our customers are and what type of information they need from design engineers.
Once we’ve decided to control something (think of our prevention and detection controls), we then need to decide how to measure it. Different controls may need different measuring requirements, which can give us discrete or continuous data.
We treat these data types differently when collecting it, determining sample sizes, and analyzing it for results. Tune-in to learn more about how to take the next step in defining controls: figuring out how to measure it and considering the data.
Analyzing our design concept for controls can be a great way to stay customer-focused and create products that are easy to use.
There are two basic buckets that we want to think of in terms of controls: prevention controls and detection controls. What are their differences and why do we differentiate between them? We explore this and take a look at risk, too.
Your team is faced with a complex decision. Maybe it’s complex because you have a lot of options or maybe it’s complex because it’s technically challenging and requires some testing. You may want to consider a structured approach: DMRCS.
We’ve identified safety concerns about our product design. How concerned do we need to be about quality while we’re determining root causes? There is an intersection of quality, reliability, and safety. Let’s talk about how they fit together.
SIPOC diagrams can be used at the beginning of improvement projects, to help teams gauge the scope of a change or to help the team get on the same page. These diagrams can also help a team understand a complex system with many people involved or lots of information exchanges.
SIPOC is short for Suppliers-Inputs-Process-Outputs-Customers.
In creating one with our team, we usually don’t fill it out left to right. We talk about how to build one in this episode.
We also step through an example. Look below for the results.
There’s a model that can help us visualize and consider the different barriers to harm: The Swiss Cheese Model of Accident Causation.
Learn what makes up this model and how ideas are represented. There are also different ways that the model is being used today.
How can we design for controls, policies, or actions that are part of the use of our product but outside of our control? We step through an example of a situation where we’re thinking about our product design in this way.
There is a rather large family of test methods associated with Qualitative Accelerated Tests. They’re also known as RETs (or Reliability Enhancement Tests).
Today, we’re focused on the models that are used to help us with the design. Awareness about these methods will help us with future test plans and project management. We talk about environmental stress testing and remind ourselves a little about HALT.
We’re developing requirements for our product, including setting reliability requirements. Or we’re setting acceptance criteria for our test plans.
What confidence levels do we choose? We don’t have to blindly set them – we can base it off the risks of failure, using our FMEA (failure mode effects analysis).
We’re starting to populate an FMEA table with our team. We get it started, but then we get stuck in disagreements. Or we think we finish it and then we don’t know what to do with it.
We can avoid these headaches with a little planning (or maybe a lot of planning – it depends on the project). We talk about risk management planning as it relates to FMEA.
We talk about the 8D methodology, describe situations where we could benefit from it, list each of the 8 Disciplines, and compare it to PDSA and DMAIC.
How do we go about mistake-proofing our product design? As we’re looking at our user process, we can use a quality method that’s well-used in manufacturing production: poka-yoke (mistake-proof).
Download the guidelines and checklist, and then follow-along with the podcast.
We want to engage a reliability engineer in an analysis for our product design. They can help us produce some great information from which we can make decisions. You might be feeling uncomfortable about our team making a design decision based on those results. You don’t quite understand how the reliability engineer came up with the answer. You want to know where that information comes from so you can gauge the level of project risk of our decision.
We peel-back the curtain on reliability engineering methods. We explore reliability engineering’s roots and development, from the 1950’s through today, to better understand the results of an analysis. Having a general understanding of reliability methods can help us get comfortable with using the results.
