Journey from Production to Consumption: Enhancing Product Reliability

When you design a product, you consider the field reliability. Use environment usually comes to mind first. Do you also consider the stresses it undergoes from its creation to the end user’s hands?

We talk about designing for reliability, accounting for not just the product’s use but also its journey from production to the consumer. As a part of our in-depth discussion, we’ll look into the role of various environments – field and production – in affecting a product’s reliability.

By the end of this episode, you’ll see field reliability as including the various stresses acting on a product from its inception. So, buckle up as we embark on this journey to rethink reliability during design.

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QDD Redux: Choose Reliability Goals for Modules

We have a reliability target for our system. But we’re not meeting it.

To avoid this scenario, what is something we can do in early development?

When we’re figuring out our concept, we can better learn about our options. We can work with Reliability Engineers to understand what we know, the risk in what we don’t know, and to prioritize reliability of the modules to be able to meet the reliability of our whole system.

We talk about using reliability allocation to help us choose reliability goals for modules of our product design. And we talk about its limitations.

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Reliability Engineering during Design, with Adam Bahret (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

Dianna Deeney interviews Adam Bahret about reliability engineering during design: how product design engineers and product development leadership can incorporate reliability engineering.

This interview is part of our series, “A Chat with Cross Functional Experts”. Our focus is speaking with people that are typically part of a cross-functional team within engineering projects. 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. [Read more…]

QDD Redux: 5 Options to Manage Risks during Product Engineering

Part of Quality during Design is using reliability engineering as part of the design process.

We’re warming up to the topic this week with a QDD Redux episode – pulling an episode from our archive from last year that’s a good overview of some things we’ll be getting more into.

Next week, I’m interviewing a Reliability Engineer as part of the series A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts.  You won’t want to miss it!

So, let’s stretch and warm-up to Reliability during Design! 

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The Instant Glory of Projects

We do projects all the time. Some projects are about developing new things, and others are about improving what we have – continuous improvement.

In the quality realm, there’s what they call the instant glory model. This same kind of thing can happen in product design, too.

We talk about what quality folks call an instant glory, and what to do about it in product design engineering.

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What to do about Virtual Meetings

Virtual meetings are here to stay.

What does this mean when product design engineers are trying to get design inputs from the cross-functional team?

It means we need to adapt and to show that we’re consistent and that we can be trusted to facilitate the meeting within time and with goals achieved.

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QDD Redux: How to self-advocate for more customer face time (and why it’s important)

We’ve been talking about how to best work with our cross-functional team at early concept development – to use quality and reliability tools in working meetings to really understand the concept space as a way to design for how the customer may experience our new concept idea.

Coming out of our talks make be questions about unknowns or misalignments. We may need to meet our customers where they’re at to get clarity.

When engineers say, “I’d like to talk with a customer about this,” we usually get push-back.

We need to tackle objections and remove obstacles between design engineers and their customers. For ideas, I’ve pulled an episode from the archive, originally published December 2021.

Listen-in to learn how we can take next steps in the concept space when visiting customers.

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Engineering with Receptivity, with Sol Rosenbaum (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

Dianna Deeney interviews Sol Rosenbaum about engineering with receptivity: how an openness toward others for new impressions and different ideas can lead to a successful engineering career.

This interview is part of our series, “A Chat with Cross Functional Experts”. Our focus is speaking with people that are typically part of a cross-functional team within engineering projects.

About Sol

Sol Rosenbaum graduated with a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering and is currently the Owner & Managing Engineer of a small firm providing engineering support and energy analysis to commercial properties as part of the mortgage financing process. He also has a passion for mentoring younger engineers and founded The Engineering Mentor where he provides material geared towards younger engineers and helping them along in their engineering journey.

Sol and Dianna talk about:

• Differences in project work, in seeing things through from project start-to-finish or becoming an expert in one aspect of a project.
• How new technologies make things more efficient, and how an understanding of the underlying basics is needed, too.
• The importance of showing up with openness and humility.
• What types of things experienced engineers can do to help less experienced engineers.
• How less experienced engineers can approach teamwork and their important contributions.

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Don’t Wish for Cross-Functional Buy-in on Product Designs – Plan to Get It!

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

We take these wishes…
“I wish I had the cross functional input that I need for design inputs.”
“I wish I could work with my cross functional team.”
“I wish my team would accept my design idea.”

…and we add a plan to make them a GOAL.

We plan for what it is we want and how we’re going to get there using Quality during Design.

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Before You Start Engineering Solutions, Do This

We’re given information about an opportunity for a new product.

We talk about what can happen when we start solution-building just with what we’re given. And we talk about an alternative start to a new engineering project.

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QDD Redux Ep. 4: Statistical vs. Practical Significance

In this special episode of Quality during Design Redux, we’re pulling episodes from our archive about test results analysis.

In our Season 1 – Episode 93  titled “The Fundamental Thing to Know from Statistics for Design Engineering”, we talked about hypothesis testing: how it is used for lots of data analysis techniques.

When we’re looking at results (like measures of a characteristic), we need to take care not to get too hung-up on what the statistics is trying to tell us. Yes, statistical tools are a good way for us to make decisions and the results can act as proof for us. But, there’s a practical, engineering side to results, too. We need to evaluate the statistical significance along with the practical significance.

We review an example and how to document it.

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QDD Redux Ep. 3: When it’s Not Normal: How to Choose from a Library of Distributions

When trying to fit a probability distribution to quantitative results, sometimes the normal probability doesn’t fit. Minitab has a wealth of distributions to pick from. Do you just pick whichever one Minitab tells you fits the best? Maybe not. Just because the distribution fits your data doesn’t mean it’s a good one to use. We review my top 3 distributions for product testing and some other ones that come up but may not be appropriate to use.

We’ll also share what you need to think about when picking a distribution:

1. think about your purpose of test
2. consider your failure mode and how you’re expecting your product to perform – does the typical use case of a distribution fit?
3. when you have options, the simpler the distribution the  better (i.e. choose a 2-parameter over a 3-parameter)

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QDD Redux Ep. 2: How to Handle Competing Failure Modes

SHOW NOTES

In this special episode of Quality during Design Redux, we’re pulling episodes from our archive about test results analysis.

Originally released May 2021. We talk about the importance of examining failure modes plus other topics.

If we’re not careful with or ignore failure modes, we can choose the wrong reliability model or statistical distribution. If our product performance is close to the required limits and/or we need a very accurate model, this could be a big problem.

We talk about the importance of failure modes and step-through a tensile-test example to explore these other topics:

• competing failure modes
• suspensions
• independent vs. dependent
• reliability block diagrams

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