Transcript

I’ve got a riddle for you today. What does swiss cheese and risk management have in common? I’ll tell you the answer after the introduction. Hello, and welcome to Quality during Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products others love, for less. My name is Dianna. I’m a senior level quality professional…

We’re starting out with a new product design. We’re really not sure if the components we’re choosing are robust enough for the field conditions we’re expecting our product to function within. There’s a set of tests that can help with that. Listen in for more about environmental stress testing. Hello and welcome to Quality during…

We are developing requirements for our product, including setting reliability requirements and its confidence levels 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. I’ll tell you how after this brief intro. Hello…

We’re jumping into an FMEA starting to populate table cells and organize information. We may even be doing things right, having a team approach and inviting our cross-functional team members to the discussions. We get started, but then we don’t agree on ratings to assign, like severity, occurrence, or detection ratings. Or we get anywhere…

What is 8D? Now, we’re not talking about 8 dimensions and things like quantum physics. We are talking about a quality tool, a system and a methodology for fixing a problem. So, what is it? How does it compare to some of the other common continuous improvement and problem-solving methods? And when we want to…

How do we go about mistake-proofing our product design? There’s a checklist we can use, based on a well-known manufacturing production method, poka-yoke. Let’s talk about poka-yoke for product design, after this brief introduction.  Hello and welcome to quality during design, the place to use quality thinking to create products others love, for less. My name is Dianna. I’m…

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…

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…

I saw a question on social media about mind-maps. After looking at the thread and learning a little more, I recommended trying out a process flow chart or a spaghetti diagram instead. A mind map is popular in a lot of workspaces. Process flow charts are popular with QE’s and process engineers. Spaghetti diagrams sound…

Design for Excellence (DFX) is a concept that includes many initiatives, like design for usability (or Ux), 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 environment (DFE), including design for disassembly (DFD). What are reasons that a business…