Why Your Design Inputs Need to Include Quality & Reliability

You’re nearing the end of your project, getting cross-functional approval on your design, when your QE or RE friend comes running with a big, red STOP button! Let’s avoid that!

Quality and Reliability are INPUTS into the design process, much earlier than by the time we have a prototype in-hand (even at the black-box, input-output phase). Getting the QEs and REs involved early will help your design be a success with suppliers, manufacturers, and your cross-functional team.

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If you’re in a design project now and haven’t gotten your QE and RE friends involved yet, reach out! Tell them about your project, see how they’d like to get involved.  

I’d like to know from you in the comments, one of these two questions.

1. How many QEs and REs support your project now? 
2. What is the most common type of work your QE and RE resources provide?

Citations

Episode Transcript

Imagine this: You’re nearing the end of your project, crossing the T’s, dotting the I’s, getting cross functional approval on your design. Then comes your quality engineering or reliability engineering friend with a big red STOP button! We don’t want that! Listen in and I’ll tell you a way to avoid that.

Hello and welcome to Quality During Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products others love for less. My name is Dianna. I’m a senior-level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing, design and quality. Listen in and then joined the conversation at QualityDuringDesign.com.

You’re at the end of your design process, proud of what you’ve accomplished. And, then come other people from other cross functional groups and there saying, “No.” Quality engineering and reliability engineering friends are pointing out some problems with your design.

Quality and reliability: something that’s important to know is that it’s an input into your design process. It is not quality control for the design process. There have been many times that I heard designers say, “I didn’t know I could ask for that analysis and get that type of information.” And I’ve heard numerous quality engineering and reliability engineering people say, “I really wish they had involved me earlier. I could have helped them with that or made it better for them.” If we wait until we have a prototype in our hand to start applying quality methods and getting input from our quality and reliability friends, it’s too late. We’re too far down the design path.

By not applying quality thinking earlier, we’ve missed out on a lot of opportunities that would have been easy to implement and have great lasting effects on our product design. By not involving our quality friends earlier in the design process:

• we’ve missed out on some opportunities to make our design more robust, more functional, safer and easy to use
• we missed an opportunity to arrange supplier agreements with details that reduce risk
• we’ve missed a better understanding of the in-process manufacturing testing needs or design for manufacture ability
• and we’ve missed opportunities to design out risk because we didn’t thoroughly understand the risks in our product not working, our user not understanding how it works, or our manufacturer not understanding critical features of a component

Besides the missed opportunities, applying quality methods and tools and thinking during the design process also helps facilitate cross functional input early. I facilitated many quality analysis meetings with a cross functional team. So, the team consisted of product designers but also marketing, field ops, other independent designers, regulatory, manufacturing…and there is not one analysis that I’ve helped perform where the designers just happened to capture all the risk on their own. And, in many cases, there was a lot of learning happening between all the cross functional groups.

To conclude this episode, recognize that the methods that quality and reliability engineers use can result in design inputs: inputs that you can take advantage of early as opportunities to implement the right type of controls, and your best design. Get your quality engineering and reliability engineering friends involved early. Even at the black box phase where you only have inputs, outputs and a black box as a design.

If you’re in a design project now and haven’t gotten your QE and RE friends involved yet, reach out. Tell them about your project, see how they’d like to get involved. And check in at qualityduringdesign.com because I’ll be sharing tips, tricks and other educational opportunities to help you learn what analysis you can ask your friends for, at what point in your design process you can apply it, and what you can do with the results.

This has been a production of Deeney Enterprises. Thanks for listening.