Modern approaches to product reliability improvement

Abstract

The business impact of product reliability Reliability assurance development is a key ingredient for improving the reliability performance of manufactured products, but there are a wide range of factors which are also incentive to this performance such as:• overall management of the reliability function;• the intensity of reliability assessment and evaluation during the design and development phase; • utilization of field failure data and the depth of subsequent technical and statistical analysis; • controlling the consistency of manufacture and assembly; • effective management and control of engineering changes. Improving the reliability of a product is an important part of the larger picture of improving product quality. A momentous quality characteristic, reliability is concerned with the performance of the product's function over a stated period of time. Therefore, whereas quality is defined as conformance to requirements, reliability on the other hand is defined as a failure or fault-free performance in all products provided to the customer. Compared with quality which embraces the whole organization, reliability has a more product specific definition and therefore should be the main impetus to continuously improving the performance of the product's functionality.BS 4778[1] defines reliability as the ability of an item to perform a required function under stated conditions for a stated period of time. The item can refer to a manufactured product or its constituent units and components, manufacturing and assembly systems (e.g. transfer lines), mechanical and electrical process systems and general mechanical, electrical and electronic systems. An expansion of the above formal definition of reliability leads to qualitative and quantitative expressions:• qualitatively -absence of functional failure during use or service;• quantitatively -the probability that an item will give failure-free performance of its intended functions for the specified duration of time. The advantages of reliability assurance development encompassing all the relevant business functions are both qualitative and quantitative. The main

A multi-objective model for lot-sizing with supplier selection for an assembly system

“…Although one may think of the quality of the finished product, in this paper, we consider product reliability, mainly because reliability has a more product-specific definition than quality (Ahmed 1996). The reliability of an assembly item is defined as 'the probability that an item will perform a required function without failure under stated conditions for a stated period of time' (O'Connor and Kleyner 2011, 1).…”

Failure Effects and Resolution of Modes: A Novel Fmea Treatise for Finalizing Mould Designs in Foundries

“…Tie raking rule for M 1 Hence the rank order of mould designs is M 2 , M 3 and M 1 respectively (refer column eight in Table 9)…”

“…Moreover, there is pitfall in traditional FMEA due to the nature of RPN scale itself. As a product of three numbers, the RPN scale does not cover the range [1,1000] continuously and presents a series of "holes" corresponding to prime numbers present in the range itself. Actually, 88% of the scale is empty with only 120 unique RPNs because some of the RPNs are repeating.…”

“…In order to ensure the required quality level, the foundries have to implement a continuous quality enhancement strategy during development stage of cast components. Failure prevention is an important practice to improve the quality level [1,2,3]. Among the various failure prevention techniques, FMEA has been used popularly in several areas during the past few decades.…”

Improvement in Product Development: Use of back-end data to support upstream efforts of Robust Design Methodology

“…FMEA is a commonly applied tool in addressing potential failures in the product development process and its effects on systems or products (Smith, 2001, Kus̆ar et al, 2004. FMEA also offers an approach to ensure product reliability (Ahmed, 1996), and is, therefore, strongly connected to product usage conditions and environments. The claims analysis flow is suggested as a key practice to support upstream RDM efforts with the use of back-end data.…”