Page 265 - Handbook of Materials Failure Analysis

2 Design Verification Activities in R&D, QA (Performance/Reliability) 261

2 DESIGN VERIFICATION ACTIVITIES IN R&D, QA
(PERFORMANCE/RELIABILITY), AND MANUFACTURE
QC AND THEIR TRAPS
Completing the design of a new product requires two kinds of activities—managerial
and technical skills. Managerial skill includes adopting a process improvement
approach, such as Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), and controlling
quality, which Japan has pursued for over 60 years (starting with training by
Dr. W. Edwards Deming at the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers) [6].
Technicalskillinvolves usingaproduct-specificvalidationandverificationapproach.
CMMI has been developed by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie
Mellon University [7]. It outlines five organizational levels; from lowest to highest,
these are initial, managed, defined, quantitatively managed, and optimizing. The
purpose of assessing the level of organization is to raise it to the highest level, at
which CEOs expect to produce perfect products. This is not an exact approach,
but a technique to back up and assess the principal manufacturing process.
Quality control is mainly related to manufacturing. Its focus is how to assure that
item variations are within the tolerances of already determined specifications. There-
fore, quality control methods are dimensionally different than the verification of new
product designs, since the product developer should determine and establish the nec-
essary specifications for new products as well as their tolerances. Quality control
is not generally an activity in the design area, but a necessary activity in the
manufacturing field in Figure 11.2.
Let’sconsiderproduct-specificverificationasatechnicalskill.Generally,engineers
check numerous design items when developing new products. In the NASA Systems

Design verification Product verification

Identify failure mode Quality The origin
through testing over time
of failure
#3 #2 #1
Conformance
IDEA Market/
generation Performance Reliability to customer
specification

Design Manufacture

Opinion collected from customer

FIGURE 11.2
Confusing quality control: (1) R&D, (2) QA (performance/reliability), (3) manufacture QC.