Quality during Design

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...

When we're trying to innovate, we can get trapped into the old thinking that the solution has to be out there somewhere. We need to think outside the box to find the solution to a problem. We should stop brainstorming and, instead, think inside the box with Systematic Inventive Thinking. We use systematic approaches to do lots of things, and being innovative can be one of them, too. This podc...

HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Test) uses the weakest link mentality. We apply stresses beyond what our designs would normally see in the environment to make something fail. It's meant to be an iterative test program where you are testing, analyzing the results, determining the root cause, fixing the design, and then testing it, again. This podcast reveals more about its roots, why you should...

It takes a village to produce a design from concept to realization. Everyone along the way seems to think of risk a little bit differently. Designers are both directly and indirectly involved with all these risk management methods, but it's important to understand who is looking at what type of information. Why? Because of communication. One group might think that risk management is covered i...

You're nearing the end of your project, getting cross-functional approval on your design, when your QE or RE friend comes running with a big, red STOP button!  Let's avoid that! Quality and Reliability are INPUTS into the design process, much earlier than by the time we have a prototype in-hand (even at the black-box, input-output phase). Getting the QEs and REs involved early will help...

You have identified a potential failure in your design. It's a complicated failure that has multiple potential root causes, and some that are conditional. Is there a tool that can capture it all and help prioritize your reactions to get rid of this problem? Yes, there is: Fault Tree Analysis! Learn what it is and how it can help you get a handle on that big failure. Send us a message Work wit...

Have you ever designed a product that works but that customers just don’t want to use? This podcast will review some tools and strategies to help prevent that from happening before product launch, or to help as a starting point when you plan for your version 2.0.  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...

You have a design you want to make better. Or you're working within a designing framework that you think needs to be updated. Quality folks use and promote some standard problem solving and continuous improvement methods, and you’ll want to to get started with the right one, or reference the right acronym when getting buy-in for your project. You may have heard of PDCA, PDSA, and DMAIC. You v...