Quality during Design

It costs our customers to own our designed products. It costs them initially to purchase it, but it also costs them to use it, maintain it, repair it, and eventually dispose of it. And it costs our company in ways too, like processing, training requirements for customers, and warranty repair costs. Life cycle costing can help our team choose between design alternatives, like alternate design optio...

Good reliability requirements are going to drive our design decisions relating to the concept, the components, the materials, and other stuff. So, the moment to start defining reliability requirements is early in the design process. But, what makes a well-defined reliability requirement? There are five aspects it should cover: do you know what they are?  We'll describe what makes a good relia...

We have good requirements for the reliability of our design. We also have a preliminary design with ideas of how we're going to manufacture it. Is our design idea good enough? Are there things we should do to improve its performance and reliability? For a physical product, there are three general stages in its life cycle. In many cases the failure rates of physical products can be represented...

Flowcharting isn't just useful for manufacturing processes. We can use them in lots of ways to help us with design of products and to identify quality characteristics.  After all, products are used by people, and the way in which they use them is a process.  compare ideal vs. actual flowcharts  identify where there is disagreement about correct sequence or steps  identify common mistakes/prob...

Genichi Taguchi related his measure of quality (variation from the target spec) with economics, called the Taguchi Loss Function. It’s used to calculate the cost (in money) of a certain deviation from a target value. It assumes that the farther our quality characteristic is from our target value, the more costly it is to us. We talk about how we can use the Taguchi Loss Functions as a way for us t...

When we've identified a risk to our design or user process - and that risk can pose a potential harm - how many controls do we need to add? We discuss prevention vs. detection controls, ALARP, as low as possible, and some scenarios where we could (and maybe couldn't) justify a risk as acceptable without adding additional controls. Send us a message Work with Dianna I help product develop...

How we describe and approach the issues we need to solve can affect how we react to them.  We know we’re supposed to be solving for root causes. But are we, instead, really just addressing symptoms? Are we celebrating the quick fix and then moving on without addressing the root of our issue?   Recognize the common mishaps of us solving symptoms instead of really getting to the causes. And, clearly...

Objectives are goalposts of what it is we’re trying to accomplish. Though they’re only a part of planning a project, if we don’t have well-defined and clear objectives, it could lead to us not having the stellar project results we want. Our objective should be a SMART ACORN.  We review these two, complementing acronyms as ways to check that we're setting up our project for success.  Send us a...

Standards are everywhere, and lots of organizations are sourcing and creating them. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission held a workshop 2019 that recently made the news, again, in July 2021. It was called “Nixing the Fix: a Workshop on Repair Restrictions”. Here’s what it's about: manufacturers are not creating products with standard parts, or their design is created so its difficult for consum...

Before we can link customer needs to design, production, and service of our products, we need to listen to and understand the voice of the customer.  We review 6 common VOC collection strategies, and talk about their pros and cons. We also discuss an affinity diagram process, which may help our team organize all of the data to get to customer needs. Visit the podcast blog for a transcript and extr...

We can look at test methods like a product in and of itself. Because tests also have requirements and need to produce usable results, we validate against those requirements. Validating our test method also ensures that they are precise and accurate. We talk about things to consider when looking at product tests: tying test methods to the product's use environment, standards, and cumulative ef...

Creating specs for suppliers and producers is generally at the forefront of our thoughts about the activity. But, it's also important to design for our QA friends, too, for inspection. We talk about what acceptance sampling is all about. We also step through a thought process for identifying and creating design features for inspection using FMEA. See the transcript at the podcast blog . Send...

When designs fail we can take on damaging mindsets while we're deciding our next steps, and this can lead us to bad decisions. We explore this and give some examples of pitfalls. We also talk about what to do within the design-realm to prepare for and combat those mindsets. Finally, I share my mantra when designing activities get tough with failures.   Send us a message Work with Dianna I hel...

In the quality world, kaizen is a tool for continuous improvement under the umbrella of a Lean philosophy. The quality-tool kaizen is just one layer of a larger, overarching idea that we benefit from small, incremental improvements made consistently. Kaizen as a tool involves all employees of the company toward continuous improvement. The way kaizen events are done helps to promote the continuous...

A Fishbone Diagram is named for its looks because it resembles the bones of a fish drawn on paper. Its less creative names are Cause-and-Effect Diagram and Ishikawa Diagram. It's popularly known to help with root cause analysis. But, we can also use it to help with goals and to evaluate a potential solution. Why is it a Supertool? Just creating its headings helps us to better define our quest...

We're in the middle of our design process and we're getting some of the first parts in hand, either from prototyping or benchtops, or our manufacturing cell. Let's test them and finish our verification testing! Maybe we shouldn’t. We talk about the concept of production equivalent: what it means and when it's important to consider. For a transcript and extra links, see the podc...

"A picture is worth a thousand words" is an old saying, and it holds true! Visual standards, visual aids, and quality standards are a great tool, especially in design when communicating the limits of acceptability. This episode explores areas to capture this type of information and how it can be used not just for Quality Assurance and Production, but also for FMEA, root cause analysis, a...

The likeness of the Pareto Principle can be compared to Murphy's Law and the Peter Principle: it's a curious phenomenon. So, how did it make its way into quality? If using it to make decisions, there are some common pitfalls which can lead to delays in fixing a problem or even misdirect our efforts. So, what is it, and how can we use it for design? Get to know the Pareto Chart. If it&apo...

Part of being an effective team member is knowing what the other teammates are responsible for doing. It's important because we need to know who to ask or interface with at certain points in our design process. This episode introduces (or reintroduces) some of our quality friends in design: Quality Engineer, Reliability Engineer, Supplier Quality, Calibration Technician, Quality Technician, a...

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 so...

You may have heard of QMS (Quality Management Systems) but are not sure how your activities fit in. Or, you’ve heard of QFD, ISO 9000, Six Sigma, Lean...these cryptic names that you’re not sure what they’re about. You may be doing activities under one of your company’s procedures and asking, “Why am I spending time on this?"  Sometimes it’s good to re-orient to the big picture. That’s what we...

Because of your role as a designer in product development, you have great input into the planning for what field (or real-use) data should be monitored for your product. We talk about this as post market surveillance, which is a typical term used for medical devices. This episode talks about how the post market surveillance engine follows the PDSA (plan-do-study-act) continuous improvement cycle,...

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 suspen...

A danger of using slide decks for technical design reviews is loss of important technical information. In order to summarize something in a slide or slide deck, the presenter thins-out information without its raw data and divorces it from the plots, graphs, and other technical analyses. Slide decks are useful to the presenter to pull together a meeting. Slide decks are terrible for the reviewers w...

Recent news highlights an accident involving a product with tragic results. This podcast explores this as cautionary tale and example outside of our own design house. The goal is to shift our perspectives to let us gain a better understanding of risk-based decisions. We also talk about allowing ourselves room to change our minds about risk acceptability when we learn new information, both during t...