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Quality During Design Podcast Blog

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Design Tolerances Based on Economics (Using the Taguchi Loss Function)

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Defining tolerances for our quality characteristics is sometimes not an easy task. If we set tight tolerances, it could be costly to make with a lot of rejects and rework in the future. If we’re too sloppy with our tolerances, then it can affect the functionality of our product, leading to unhappy customers, and also possible…

How many controls do we need to reduce risk?

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…

Solving symptoms instead of causes?

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Do you have SMART ACORN objectives?

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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…

Why Look to Standards

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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…

Getting the Voice of the Customer

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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…