Executing Design for Reliability Within the Product Life Cycle

Book excerpt: At an early stage of the development, the design teams should ask questions such as, "How reliable will my product be?" "How reliable should my product be?" And, "How frequently does the product need to be repaired / maintained?" To answer these questions, the design team needs to develop an understanding of how and why their products fails; then, make only those changes to improve reliability while remaining within cost budget. The body of available literature may be separated into three distinct categories: "theory" of reliability and its associated calculations; reliability analysis of test or field data – provided the data is well behaved; and, finally, establishing and managing organizational reliability activities. The problem remains that when design engineers face the question of design for reliability, they are often at a loss. What is missing in the reliability literature is a set of practical steps without the need to turn to heavy statistics. Executing Design for Reliability Within the Product Life Cycle provides a basic approach to conducting reliability-related streamlined engineering activities, balancing analysis with a high-level view of reliability within product design and development. This approach empowers design engineers with a practical understanding of reliability and its role in the design process, and helps design team members assigned to reliability roles and responsibilities to understand how to deploy and utilize reliability tools. The authors draw on their experience to show how these tools and processes are integrated within the design and development cycle to assure reliability, and also to verify and demonstrate this reliability to colleagues and customers.