Quality during Design

 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? Visit the website for ad...

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. Visit the blog fo...

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 a...

 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 engine...

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...

Not all controls are equal, and we don't have to wait for something bad to happen to start designing with them. We compare different types of controls in product development and design engineering: Prevention Controls vs. Detection Controls. We review concepts, uses for controls, risk-based controls, and how to prioritize design efforts for the right controls. Visit the podcast blog for a Ven...

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. Define Measure Reduce Combine Select Learn more about this approach by statisticians Dr. Anderson-Cook and Dr. Lu. Check the podcast blog for their...

 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. We talk about how they fit together. Visit the podcast blog at QualityDuringDesign.com for a graphic that shows how they fit together. Send us a message Work with Dianna I help product development...

We’re at the concept phases of our product design, trying to get our heads around the high-level steps that our users are going to take to use our product. We have an idea that we’ll have many different user groups interacting with our product, but we’re not so clear about the big picture – who is doing what, when and who needs what afterwards. To put it all together, we can help ourselves with a...

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 thro...

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 litt...

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). FMEA is a great tool for us to refer to, to help us choose a relevant confidence level by...

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. Visit the podcast blog for a transcript. Send...

It's almost a new calendar year! We look back at the most popular episodes, my favorite episodes, recommendations for conferences, and a look ahead at what 2022 will bring to Quality during Design. Subscribe for a weekly newsletter and to keep up to date with the new offerings in 2022. Let me know what you like by filling out this brief survey - it will help me to develop the type of content...

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. Check the podcast blog for the stopwatch graphic from Chris S.P. Visser, download a summary sheet, my book recommendation, and a link to 8D forms. Send us a message Work with Dianna I help product development teams build quality into the front end...

How do we go about mistake-proofing our product design? There are steps we can take and a checklist we can use, based on a well-known manufacturing production method: poka-yoke. Download the guidelines and checklist , and then follow-along with the podcast. Send us a message Work with Dianna I help product development teams build quality into the front end when it's cheap and easy, not late w...

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...

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...

Within our quality toolbox, there are a lot of graphical organizers. Some are better at fulfilling different goals than others. If we have a goal in mind, then we may choose a certain tool. However, we don’t want analysis paralysis about which tool is best to stop us from using any tool at all.  I share my 3 general guidelines about choosing a graphical quality tool, how to draw them, and when to...

Design for Excellence (DFX) is a concept that includes many initiatives, like design for usability, design for manufacturability and assembly, and design for environment and disassembly. It’s a focus on doing things right, exceeding customer expectations, optimizing what’s needed while minimizing costs, and continuous improvement.  Today we take a deep dive on one of those aspects: design for envi...

This episode talks about options for reliability life testing, specifically accelerated stress testing. We explore how accelerated stress testing is one subset of other reliability life testing, when it's a good idea, how we can approach doing it, and what we can do with the results. Visit the podcast blog for links and references. Related episodes:  Episode 6 “HALT! Watch out for that weakes...

What is design of experiments, or DOE? What do we use it for and what is it all about? We talk about when we might want to use it during the design cycle, and we do this without getting into all of the how-to and mathematical equations. Visit the podcast blog for a transcript. Send us a message Work with Dianna I help product development teams build quality into the front end when it's cheap...

We’ve collected all sorts of preliminary information about our users that we’re using for a new product design. We may be faced with so much data we’re not sure where to turn first, or what design feature is a priority. There’s a simple, 2-way matrix we can use to help us sort it all out: an urgent/important matrix. We may have used it to prioritize tasks for ourselves or as a management strategy...

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 signif...

In this episode we review sampling for design tests. We talk through a generic thought process for choosing a statistically relevant sample size and propose some basics that we can all learn about to better understand sampling. Our goal is for us to be able to better talk through a sampling scenario with our quality and reliability engineering friends, and to better prepare for the information tha...