Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
If you have quality friends, you may have heard of Gemba. What is Gemba and can it help with product design?
Gemba is an ideology.
And, yes, it can help with product design!
We explore how and talk about why you might want to adopt the term “Gemba” for product design engineering.
Dianna and Fred discussing how to get next steps when being presented a problem by quality assurance.
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“A Chat with Cross Functional Experts” is a Quality during Design interview series. Our focus is speaking with people that are typically part of a cross-functional team for new product development. We discuss their viewpoints and perspectives regarding new products, the values they bring to new product development, and how they’re involved and work with product design engineering teammates.
Today we talk with Gabor Szabo. Gabor is an engineering and data professional with experience in numerous industries, including the medical device and automotive industries. In his current role a Sr. Principal Engineer of Operations Excellence, he works with various cross-functional teams on validating new processes and products, launching new products, helps them diagnose and solve technical problems. He hosts the Critical Talks podcast. He also develops software and builds data products in R.
Reliability Engineering isn’t just about assessments. It’s about providing information to make decisions. How does reliability engineering affect design?
We answer all the questions from the classical Kipling Method:
FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) is a tool we can use to help us investigate complaints from the field. The FMEA is a matrix of the collective team knowledge about the risks of this product, so it’s a valuable source in our investigation about what’s going on in the field.
We talk through how to go about using FMEA for complaint investigation and what we can do with the information.
Many presentation books and guides seem to focus on presentations that we see at conferences, for sales pitches, or for executive meetings about business topics.
They don’t seem applicable to the technical design reviews that engineers host.
But they do relate.
We talk about just 3 ways that we can change how we can plan technical design reviews, using some of the principles of presentations.
Dianna and Fred discussing customer service: personal and professional experiences.
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This interview focuses on product design from a marketing viewpoint, including sales and commercial operations.
“A Talk with Cross Functional Experts” is a Quality during Design interview series. Our focus is speaking with people that are typically part of a cross-functional team for new product development. We discuss their viewpoints and perspectives regarding new products, the values they bring to new product development, and how they’re involved and work with product design engineering teammates.
Today we speak with Laura Krick, a VP for a global medical device manufacturer (who has, since our interview, been promoted to Chief Commercial Officer – congratulations!). She’s involved in marketing, sales, and commercial operations for new product development.
We talk about these topics:
Listen to a Chat with Laura. Gain a different perspective and get actionable advice.
Dianna and Fred discussing why and how to encourage new engineers and foster younger generations to consider engineering as a profession.
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FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) is a super-tool for a team, especially when developing concepts and requirements. Done early, iteratively, and treated as a “living” analysis helps teams throughout development and beyond.
Some people seem to either love it or hate it. I don’t have a strong reaction like that, but I do think it can be a valuable option for teamwork and design – so much so that I’ve dedicated a few episodes to it (including this one). We touch on some of the objections to it, too.
FMEAs can have different focuses and can be built to suit the goals of the team. There are two FMEAs, in particular, that can be done in the early concept stages of development: “use” UFMEA and “systems design” DFMEA.
When defining design inputs and specifications, what does a design engineer need to consider about the test and measure capability? What are the typical ways that we assess the variability that a test or measurement introduces into our result?
Reliability engineers may suggest environmental stress tests. There are many types of tests in an RE’s toolbox. We compare two types of commonly known tests that are used for design: ALT vs. HALT. What are the important distinctions between these two methods? What value do they each bring to design engineering? And how do they fit into other reliability test methods?
Dianna and Fred discussing software tools used by reliability engineers: the good, the bad, and pitfalls.
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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.