Peter C. Sander

Managing product reliability in business processes 'under pressure'

Product reliability is often seen as a product attribute. Models with different degree of sophistication analyze and predict the reliability of a product as a function of the internal structure (such as components and their relation). The practical relevance of these models, in relation with the (business) processes in which the related products are actually used, is not often addressed. Different types of reliability issues, however, can be relevant for products in different industrial contexts. This paper will present a classification model to describe different business processes, based on the degree of product innovation. It will also propose a taxonomy that can be used to classify different types of reliability problems. As this paper will demonstrate, only certain combinations of reliability problems are relevant for certain business processes. It will also show that, given certain technology trends, some combinations will become more relevant in the future. The final part of this paper will demonstrate that especially for these combinations many of the existing reliability analysis and prediction methods can be considered inadequate.

Analysis of quality information flows in the product creation process of high-volume consumer products

It is recently realised that Quality and Reliability are not only a function of the product but also of the organisation realising the product. In spite of this very few companies are able to translate this into their business processes. The Maturity Index on Reliability (MIR) was developed to measure and improve the capability of organisations to analyse, predict and improve the reliability of current and future products. The MIR concept is based on the analysis of reliability related information flows. In this paper the MIR concept is explained and a case study of a MIR assessment is given.

MIR: The use of reliability information flows as a maturity index for quality management

Quality and reliability management has seen a couple of large changes over the last five decades. In the 1950s and 1960s the quality of a product depended on the quality of the components used; during the 1970s and 1980s research concentrated very much on quality and reliability as functions of product structure and architecture research. The late 1980s and 1990s have learned that, in addition to the aspects mentioned earlier, there is also a strong relation between (quality of) business processes and quality of products. The increasing emphases on ISO 9000 (do we say what we do; do we do what we say?) and total quality management (TQM) are clear examples of the latter. This paper will show that a high-level quality objective such as ISO or TQM can easily become a goal in itself and therefore can become disconnected from the actual, operational, business processes. This paper will explain the background of this phenomenon using paradigms from control theory and will propose a concept to fill the gap. This concept is called the maturity index on reliability (MIR). The paper will explain the MIR concept and will apply it to an actual, industrial, business process. Copyright

The use of quality metrics in service centres

In industry it is not well realised that a service centre is potentially one of the major contributors to quality improvement. Service is able to collect vital information about the field behaviour of products in interaction with customers. If this information is well analysed and communicated, the recurrence of old problems in new products will drastically be reduced and so will the expenses on recalls, repairs, warranties, and liabilities. In this paper we discuss the kind of information a service centre has to collect and some quality-related metrics that organisations use, like the field call rate, or should use, like the hazard function.

Policy formulation by use of QFD techniques : a case study

The quality function deployment (QFD) theory focuses on customer needs and expectations and methodically deploys them through product design, parts selection, process planning and production planning, leading to shorter design times and more customer-oriented products. It is demonstrated that the QFD techniques can also improve the procedures that are used to formulate annual policy. Therefore a conceptual procedure is presented to formulate annual policy based on QFD techniques, and a case study is presented in which it is demonstrated that the QFD theory can function as an indicator of problems that have to be faced if one wants to improve towards more customer orientation and better communication, cross functional as well as between lower and higher management in the policy formulation process.

The building bricks of product quality: An overview of some basic concepts and principles

An overview is given of the role companies, and their business processes, have in product quality during the product lifecycle of a product. The basic business processes and possible organisation forms of those processes are discussed. The trends in these business processes are used to illustrate the current inherent instability of these processes. It is explained how companies can deal with this instability using paradigms from control theory where the quality information flow in a company is used to analyse and optimise product quality. An example illustrates the presented methods. Finally conclusions and future lines of research are given.

The role of the service centre in improvement processes

Product reliability is the final result of a process that starts with marketing/development and that ends with service and, later, decommissioning and when possible reuse. The contribution of design and production in this chain is well understood. There are many papers and books about methods and tools that help to develop and produce reliable products. Much less attention has been given to the mutual co-operation of the different departments in the whole chain. In particular the contribution of service in the ongoing improvement loop is not yet well recognized. In this paper we demonstrate that on a company level it has advantages to see service as a department that is crucial in the control loop over the product creation process. Service is able to collect vital information about the field behaviour of products in interaction with customers. If this information is well analysed and communicated, the recurrence of old problems in new products will be drastically reduced and so will the expenses on recalls, repairs, warranties and liabilities. Copyright

Field Reliability Prediction in Consumer Electronics Using Warranty Data

In innovative fast product development processes, such as consumer electronics, it is necessary to check as quickly as possible, using field data, whether the product reliability is at the right level. In consumer electronics, some major companies use the Warranty Call Rate (WCR) for this purpose. This paper discusses extensively the theoretical and practical drawbacks of the WCR. Subsequently, it is demonstrated, using a Weibull failure distribution, that only a few months after product launch, say three months, the warranty data offer the opportunity to estimate the parameters of the failure distribution. Of course, this requires that the warranty data are available in the quality department. Unfortunately, for some companies the field feedback information process from the repair centres to the quality department causes a delay of several months. These companies have to speed up their field feedback information process before they can fully take advantage of the proposed estimation procedure. Copyright

Reliability in a time driven product development process.

Fierce competition in the marketplace has led to industry giving a high priority to achieving time-to-market profitability. This results in an increasing pressure to introduce new products in a shorter time. At the same time, owing to new technological innovations, the complexity of the products increases as well. An additional pressure is that the customers also expect a high reliability of these complex and sometimes expensive products. This means that increasingly complex products have to be developed in a shorter time with higher levels of quality and reliability. In this paper we demonstrate by use of a case study how quality and reliability can be managed in a time-driven product development process (PDP). A general PDP is discussed first, then the case study is given, and finally it is discussed in general how high reliability can be combined with short time to market. Copyright

Designing reliability information flows

It is well-known [Reliab. Eng. Syst. Saf. 75 (2002) 295] that in modern development processes it is essential to have an information flow structure that facilitates fast feedback from product users (customers) to departments at the front end, in particular development and production. As information is only relevant if it is used when taking decisions, this paper presents a guideline for building field feedback information flows that facilitate the decision taking during the product creation and realisation process. The guideline takes into consideration that the type of decisions depends on the span-of-control, therefore following Parsons [Structure and Process in Modern Societies (1990)] the span-of-control is subdivided into the following three levels: strategic, tactic, and executive. The guideline is illustrated with a case in which it is used for analysing the quality of existing field feedback flows.