Overlapping Ideas: Quality, Reliability, and Safety

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.

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Using SIPOC to Get Started

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.

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Risk Barriers as Swiss Cheese?

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.

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Environmental Stress Testing for Robust Designs

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.

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Choosing a Confidence Level for Test using FMEA

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).

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Getting Started with FMEA – It All Begins with a Plan

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.

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How can 8D help Solve my Recurring Problem?

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.

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Mistake-Proofing – The Poka-Yoke of Usability

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.

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Getting Comfortable with using Reliability Results

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.

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How to Self-Advocate for More Customer Face Time (and why it’s important)

There are many stories of design successes attributed to the right level of understanding of the customer. Product designers make decisions, daily, about how a product is going to look and perform. So, we need to really understand the customer. And, to really get the customer, engineers need to spend time with them.

Sometimes, the business doesn’t want us to interact with the customer or doesn’t think it would be valuable. Objections include that we’re not prepared for the user’s environment, that we’re too blunt or honest, or that we just overgeneralize what we learn, anyway. Or, there’s a reluctance because of costs. Besides seeing these objections first hand, someone also listed them out in a published book! This shows that this is common across industries.

Is that fair to design engineers? No matter if it’s fair or not. We can prepare ourselves to address those objections. We talk about how we can prepare ourselves to self-advocate for more customer face time.

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