A Practical Product/Process Reliability Development and Improvement Approach 932881

This paper presents a practical reliability development and improvement approach that can be applied early to a design or process in order to help meet and exceed customer requirements and achieve customer satisfaction. The particular procedure involves proper coordination of product/process reliability growth management, design of experiments, and failure investigation which help to evaluate design or process FMEA (Failure Mode, Effects Analysis) prioritized effects and customer requirements before verification. Advantages of this system approach over other approaches is that it provides a simple, economic and integrative procedure for: 1) testing failure effects and associated performance requirements in a controlled manner so as to confirm or identify new failure mode distributions and their effects, 2) understanding the relationship of factors that contribute to design or process related failures so as to expediently implement the right corrective action and 3) using a standard and iterative accelerated test sequence or manufacturing process flow to evaluate on-going reliability growth.