Quality Lifecycle Management: Striking a Balance between

Product Reliability and Over-Design

By : Karen Bowman, Published: May 03, 2013
When it comes to product design, companies must balance four competing goals: cost, time to
market, feature set, and reliability. The key is to get the right mix and create the greatest customer
satisfaction with the product.
Too often, however, companies downplay the importance of reliability when weighed against the
other three goals. They prioritize cost, time to market, or feature set over reliability. As a result,
they arent aware of poor reliability until the product has been released and they ultimately incur
higher lifecycle costs and lower customer satisfaction due to product failures, excessive warranty
claims, and, in the most unfortunate cases, liability claims from safety incidents.
Even when companies do focus on reliability, they often fail to take a comprehensive approach
throughout the product lifecycle. Instead, they try to fix reliability issues with ad-hoc analyses only
when serious issues emerge. This band-aid approach fails to address reliability in a holistic
manner and misses the chance to reap the benefits of a more integrated program.
To avoid this outcome, companies should include reliability in up-front design decisions, and
develop formal processes for analyzing and improving the reliability of the product throughout its
lifecycle. Quality Lifecycle Management (QLM) provides the processes and tools to do just that.
QLM is a systematic way to build the right amount of reliability into a product. It works by making it
possible to plan, predict, and simulate a product and operating conditions to ensure product
designs will meet specified reliability and lifecycle cost targets once in the field. QLM standardizes
and connects quality processes throughout each stage in the product lifecycle, calling upon
enterprise tools to gather and share knowledge. It consists of setting realistic goals for reliability
and availability, measuring those goals through design and prototype testing, and tracking field
failures to determine how well those goals are being met post-production.



Finding the Sweet Spot
All that said, to minimize the lifecycle cost of a product, it is important to consciously decide how
much reliability to build into the product while still addressing key criteria for cost, time, and
features. The key is finding the sweet spot between too little and too much reliability. The more
reliability is built in during the design phase, the higher the design and manufacturing costs due to
the price for higher quality parts, redundancy, higher R&D personnel counts, or more complex
manufacturing processes. The goal is to strike a balance so that a product is reliable enough to
avoid costly post-production claims without over-designing.
For example, because consumers generally upgrade their cell phones every few years,
manufacturers do not bother building ultra-robust phones (which would eat into profit margins).
Instead they need to build in enough reliability to avoid major issues for a two- or three-year
window.
On the other hand, an automobile manufacturer cannot risk low reliability in its braking system as
this could lead to injuries or even deaths that irreparably hurt the companys reputation and lead to
exorbitant costs in court.
Although their situations are different, both the cell phone company and the automobile company
can minimize their costs by planning and tracking the quality of each product through its product
lifecycle.
No matter how much reliability a manufacturer decides to build into its product, QLM is a proven
way to ensure the company achieves its goal.
Quality Lifecycle Management is the Foundation of a Systemic Approach
Success with QLM depends on following a standardized quality management process, which
addresses the following:
1. Plan for reliability: Allocate reliability requirements to subsystems and conduct initial risk
analysis using a fault tree and Failure Modes & Effect Analysis (FMEA) to systematically identify
all of the potential failures throughout a system and develop controls to minimize or prevent
their occurrence or effects.
2. Design for reliability: Predict reliability based on the product structure, conduct maintenance
task analysis, design a reliability block diagram, perform a component FMEA, create a fault tree,
and estimate the product lifecycle cost.
3. Analyze manufacturing process: Perform a process FMEA to determine the ways in which gaps
or failures in the manufacturing processes can affect product quality. Also design control plans
to identify and minimize variations in the manufacturing process.
4. Test reliability of prototype: Create design verification plans, conduct accelerated life testing,
and analyze test failure data using a Weibull analysis.
5. Analyze and improve post-production quality: Implement a Failure Reporting and Corrective
Action System (FRACAS) to continually improve product quality. Analyze failed units for root
causes and put into place corrective actions. If its possible to capture or estimate the products
operating time, its possible to compare field reliability to the design reliability goal. Going
forward, field quality can be improved using CAPA, Nonconformance Management, and
Complaints & Customer Feedback tools.
By following this well-defined process, companies can realize significant value from PLM. Managing
quality in an integrated way throughout the product lifecycle helps manufacturers achieve the right
balance across the key criteria of reliability, cost, time, and features.
While a QLM process delivers tremendous value, it can be challenging to successfully implement
this process. Well tackle those issues in a future post.

About Karen Bowman
Karen Bowman is a Senior Reliability Consulting Engineer at PTC. As an ASQ-Certified Reliability Engineer
(CRE), Karen has performed FMEAs, Fault Trees, Weibull analyses, MTBF Predictions, RBDs, and various other
reliability and quality consulting projects for hundreds of customers. Karen has also deployed large-scale
FMEA systems and trained employees on their customized FMEA process. She received her BS in Electrical
Engineering at Lawrence Technological University and her MS in Electrical Engineering at The Pennsylvania
State University.