Reliability Growth

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Reliability Growth

Reliability Growth (RG) programs help guarantee the overall reliability of a new product prior to full-scale production. Keys to success include developing risk mitigation-based plans derived from market-driven targets, commitment to these plans, and management support.

Robust RG Program Requirements

• Reliability targets are realistic, aggressive, and systematically defined.
• Targets are expressed in a meaningful way for marketing, engineering, procurement, testing, and production.
• New product content reliability risks are assessed and quantified via an RG plan at the earliest stage of new product development --- prior to project approval. Plans must be integrated into overall master product plans.
• Programs are realistically sized (timing, activities, resources and costs) and a unique "RG Roadmap" is developed from planning through production for each new product.
• Potential problems are proactively identified and solved during engineering --- before costly prototypes and tooling are built.
• During prototype testing the actual Reliability Growth of a product is regularly tracked and managed relative to the plan.
• Management knows immediately if progress in solving problems during test deviates from the plan allowing issues to be proactively addressed.
• Products launch at or near planned Reliability targets eliminating extensive and prolonged improvement efforts after production launch.
• Once in the market products are monitored for early signs of problems allowing corrective action to be quickly taken.
• The process encourages/enables the systematic reduction of product development time and cost without risking or sacrificing reliability results.

Top Driven Results

To maintain or improve market position senior managers must be committed to meeting or exceeding reliability expectations defined by customers.

Organizations may need to change the way they think about achieving customer product reliability. What is needed is a roadmap to plan, deploy, and manage the risk of launching new technologies and improving the performance of existing technologies. This requires active top-level participation to make the necessary changes and support the program.

Results

Implemented correctly a Reliability Growth initiative will produce one or more of the following results:

• Improved Product & Process Quality & Reliability
• Improved Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty
• Increased Market Share & Profitability
• Reduced Product Development Cost & Risk
• Reduced Warranty Claims & Costs

Reliability Growth Consulting

ITI provides a unique and proven approach that enables our clients to achieve Breakthrough Improvement�Ein product quality and reliability ensuring that desired reliability levels are achieved before new products go into production. This is accomplished through an RG Program rigorously planned and implemented over the course of a project.

We follow the steps shown in the above figure to systematically identify and resolve unanticipated, undetected, or underestimated problems

Product Development Paradigm Shift

The move from physical prototypes to validate new product designs to analysis and simulation-led problem solving for virtual validation is leading the latest paradigm shift in product development. The impact relative to improvements in productivity, quality/reliability and time to market are tremendous.

ITI's TechKnowledgy Executive Series examines today's evolving product development process. Today throughout engineering and manufacturing, a paradigm shift is well underway --- impacting how products are planned, designed, tested and built. In this issue we touched briefly on Reliability Growth. For more information contact ITI at the numbers shown below or visit us at www.iti-global.com

About ITI

International TechneGroup Incorporated (ITI) specializes in product development consulting: helping clients achieve Breakthrough Improvement™ results as measured by productivity and time to market --- the single biggest factors for success. We work with clients to identify and resolve problems associated with processes, technologies, and people/culture involved throughout today's global product development processes.