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.
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.
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.
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?
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.