The use of reliability‐oriented field feedback information for product design improvement: a case study

Abstract

In the innovative industry, four major trends are found to influence product quality and reliability: the increase in product complexity, the strong pressure on time to market, the increasing global economy, and the decreasing tolerance for quality problems. Thus, it becomes more difficult to anticipate all potential failures during the product development process. In this context, an efficient field feedback process should be in place to react to the unanticipated deviations in product performance. Based on a case study made in an innovative company, this paper shows that the problem is not so much in the information collection as in the inherent quality of the information and in the manner the information is processed. Therefore, a new method, presented in this paper, was developed to classify and prioritize field data and to upgrade it into information that can be used for design improvement according to the dominant classes of failures using the four-phase roller coaster model. Although this newly generated information is richer than raw field data it is not yet detailed enough to allow direct design optimization. Therefore, a second upgrading stage, based on design of experiments, was developed. It uses a method that combines physics-of-failure (bottom-up) and field information (top-down). As traditional DoE mainly deals with largely time-independent quality data obtained during the manufacturing process the approach had to be modified to deal with timedependent reliability data. Case study results show that it is a promising approach for characterizing and resolving failure mechanisms also in innovative companies.

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

“…Claims data containing information related to customer usage and conditions (Blischke et al, 2011) present a unique opportunity to improve the design of products. The feedback of such information to the front-end of product development allows product designers to act proactively in the development of new products or the update of current ones (Magniez et al, 2009). Improvement opportunities at the product development process are further extended to include the systematic handling of possible noise factors identified in the claims analysis.…”

“…These 'voices', when analyzed and interpreted, with the assistance of, and integration into, quality tools and methodologies, can be translated into product improvement ideas (Zhou et al, 2012). This presents an opportunity to create a proactive mechanism in order to react quickly to deviations in product performance through the implementation of a field feedback loop (Magniez et al, 2009). Such a mechanism could be designed based on the customer claims database to measure actual field reliability of products to generate valuable information to be fed back into the design process (Lawless, 1998;Meeker and Hamada, 1997;Meeker and Escobar, 2004;Thomas and Rao, 1999).…”

Improving Design for Remanufacturing Though Feedback from Remanufacturing to Design

“…According to Magniez et al (2009), feedback about a product's performance has issues in terms of quality and the manner the information is processed at the companies. Examples of feedback are data from built-in smart functions in the product that will communicate numbers regarding a part's performance, information regarding what service operations have been carried out, and knowledge based on experiences on the best disassembly sequence.…”

Managing asymmetries in information flows and interaction betweenR&D, manufacturing, and service in complex product development

“…It is here vital to tackle not only the lack of quality of information but also the manner in which the information is processed (cf. Magniez et al., ). In this aspect, the study argues that the upgrading of the R&D‐service relation needs various additive efforts.…”