The Reliability as Value Factor in the Improvement of Products. Case Study: Automotive Clutch System 2004-01-3281

In the current scenery, to be competitive, the companies face the challenge of developing new products in a short period of time, with improved technology with respect to the previous one and with reduced costs to guarantee the business survival. The success is directly connected to the customers requirements, where Quality, Reliability, Supply and Price are the minimum desired. In this work, methodologies are considered, which are used for the Planning and Warranty of the Quality, which should already be used in the phase of the product design conception. In the design conception phase the quality born and significantly improves the performance, the reliability and the final price of the product. The product chosen for analysis is the Automotive Clutch and the proposed method consists in an interaction among the Kano Model, Target Cost and Value Analysis to evaluate the attendance degree to the customer requirements and to determine what functions, which relative costs, are above the relative needs, offering, therefore potential for optimization or even elimination. After that, the Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is built for identification of the critical components that offer larger fault risk in the system. The work final target is the analysis of Reliability and Regression of the results obtained in the Accelerated Life Testing, for determination of the reliability of the clutch case-study, components to be improved or optimized, as well as to propose a methodology for development of optimized products.