Quality as a Strategic Asset vs. Quality as a Control

Viewing Quality as a strategic asset to new product development can help us create those products that others love, for less. We talk about some challenges with new product development, the ideal state, and how we can use quality to get there. Use quality engineering and reliability engineering to P.R.U.N.E. the development process so we can develop the best products that we can.

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About me
Dianna Deeney helps product designers work with their cross-functional team to reduce concept design time and increase product success, using quality and reliability methods.

She consults with businesses to incorporate quality within their product development processes. She also coaches individuals in using Quality during Design for their projects.

She founded Quality during Design through her company Deeney Enterprises, LLC. Her vision is a world of products that are easy to use, dependable, and safe – possible by using Quality during Design engineering and product development.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

You're listening to an installment of the quality during design versus series. In this series, we're comparing concepts within quality and reliability to better understand them and how they can affect product design engineering. We have eight episodes in this series, which means we'll be reviewing at least 16 topics. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to quality during design the place to use quality thinking to create products others love for less. My name is Diana D. I'm the senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design. Listen in, in, and then join the conversation. Visit quality during design.com and subscribe. Hi, welcome to quality during design for products, others love for less. This is where we talk about quality and reliability engineering concepts and how it fits into product development, design engineering today, instead of talking about a particular tool or technique, we're going to take a look at the big picture, namely quality as a strategic asset to new product development versus quality as just a control. There are some known cornerstones of quality and reliability engineering. They both use risk-based thinking where we identify ways to control risk. Either with detection or prevention controls. They both are intentional with data. Whereas what are we going to be collecting? What kind of data, when are we collecting it? And why? What is the answer that we're trying to get out of collecting the data? They both bring it back to people, both internal and external customers. And there's an understanding of variation in how we need to control it. New product develop processes, pose their own challenges. Sometimes in typical design development, we usually don't spend a lot of time or effort in developing the concept before engineering development begins. In fact, we start engineering development right after the first iteration of com concepts and it's natural. It's the way engineers think. We also deal with unexpected design features that can lead to a redo of the concepts themselves, mid development. This leads to a lot of frustration and a lot of effort at the end of the development cycle. We're fighting fires through project end. When I speak with my quality and reliability engineering friends, this is a common theme and a common source of frustration for them. I wish they had involved me earlier is what the quality and reliability engineers say about new product development. We can and are allowed to change how we do things we can put more effort upfront in concept development before engineering does begins early failures, prompt, design improvements, not concept changes, steady development through engineering and test means easier planning and more consistent activities reduced firefighting. Now, there are a lot of benefits to an improved early development, more effort, and more time spent in concept development. Academic people have studied it and they show that projects are at least three times as likely to succeed with sharp fact-based product definitions before development begins. They're twice more successful. If the team does solid upfront homework doing the front end activities. Well, these activities are also associated with increased market shares, which also leads to improved profitability cross-functional teams that are empowered, resourced and accountable affects the new product development process and strategy. It increases performance dimensions. Now just the matter of improving the design quality itself has benefits. There's a higher perceived value with our customers, which leads to the more money that we can charge for it. And higher profitability and improved design quality also means that there's an improved quality and conformance in how it's made, which reduces manufacturing and source and component costs, which also increases profitability. What's the biggest difference between what many of us experience in new product development versus the ideal state? The biggest difference is that there is more cross-functional team effort and time in concept development before engineering design, There are many deliverables at the concept that contribute to the user needs and design inputs, which affect the design itself. Those that have a closer relationship to the customer and even the customers themselves are more empowered during the development process. And we can also plan tests to discover and eliminate or reduce design failures early.

: 5:46

Now, I'm not saying that And this is where we can think of quality as a strategic asset for new product development processes. Only 24% of our organizations view quality as a strategic asset for a competitive advantage over other companies doing the same kind of things. The rest of us see quality as a compliance activity or for a continuous improvement, or as just a way to fix problems and mitigate risks.

Speaker 1: 6:16

We need to shift our thinking quality and reliability engineering is a strategic asset for product development processes, and we need to proactively use it to help us improve the development process. We can use it to add more concept development and provide information to help us make decision quality engineering and reliability engineering methods effectively prune the development process by helping teams uncover ideas and make decisions with data, use risk based thinking and consistently keeping the voice of the customer at the forefront. The team can cut off off the development of ideas and development paths that are not going to contribute to a product that is safe, usable, and dependable, which allows us to focus our efforts and resources on getting the product that fits the fruit of our labor. That is the best we could produce The framework to use quality as a strategic asset is prune people focused, risk based thinking, uncover ideas, navigate decisions, and empower teams By their very nature, quality and reliability engineering methods are people focused and risk based is part of the cornerstones of their disciplines, but how can they help with early concept development and help with ideas, decisions, and teamwork. Now it's important for you as design engineers to search out information from either cross-functional to team, to uncover ideas. This needs to be a proactive thing. You make decisions daily about the product that affects all aspects downstream from manufacturing to distribution, to the users, to disposal, not asking and working with the cross-function team is a missed opportunity. I've worked in situations where user information was developed by a group of people and experts over here. Then it was thrown over the wall for the design engineers to interpret into something technical. I also talked with a prominent usability experience expert and asked him what his experiences were with working with design engineers. And his answer was that he typically didn't work with the design engineers. He worked with a project manager who then disseminated his summaries and information to the design engineers to interpret. This is dangerous because it leaves things open to interpretation and information gets lost in translation. We want to remove the buffers between us and either the customers or the people on our cross-functional team that work most with the customers. We don't want to lose information and translation. And even if they're available to ask questions, we don't always know what to ask. If we don't work with them, we can use quality to facilitate ideas. Our cross-functional team members quality frameworks can help with structured conversation. These conversations could be exploratory or they could have specific goals or outputs team built graphical tools like flow charts, CPO and fish, bone diagrams, get everyone on the same page and help teams explore ideas and details. FM E a or failure mode effects analysis, five whys and tree diagrams help to get to the root of potential issues. Early concept work includes usability engineering, including the users, their environment, and the big picture steps of how to use the product. We haven't designed the product yet. We're only thinking about a concept, but there's still a lot of usability engineering information that we can use to help drive. The design Technical assessments are performed early in the concept work and they include early reliability engineering concepts and designed for excellence. Concepts, Risk management can be performed with just a concept. Use overarching evaluation of the risk associated with the full system. This would get information for us to be able to make risk based decisions With all of these. The focus is on the customer and what they need. These are the types of information that we should have before we even start engineering drawings, analyzing this with our team early helps us to uncover the design ideas that in the end will help us make the best design choices that we can.

Speaker 2: 11:28

Quality Engineering and reliability engineering methods are also used to help us navigate decisions about the concept and the design iterations. These methods can be themselves iterative, starting with what the team may know and further developing as the team learns more about the use case and design concept Quality and reliability engineering methods can help us turn qualitative ideas into quantitative rankings of priority numbers that we can make decisions against. They can help us identify gaps in understanding between our customers and engineering. We can evaluate the usability of our concept ands by using quality methods that have been used in manufacturing processes for years and other tools like accelerated life testing and failure mode and effects analysis can be used by the team to develop concepts and requirements that are controlled by the product design itself, designing out issues and designing in features that our customers will love is most easily done at the concept phase before we started building or creating anything, a lot of the iterative and early concept evaluations can us determine what those ideas should be Before prototyping. And even before that, before you start engineering solutions, stop and facilitate some discussions with your greater cross-functional team, your customers, and those that are closest to working with your customers, remove that barrier and speak directly with them. If you can use quality and reliability methods to facilitate those meetings, work with them and start a dialogue to open ideas for more questions, for better designs and begin talking about the bad things that happen. So you can design out issues.

Speaker 1: 13:40

You may not know where to start. You can use some quality engineering tools as frameworks to help get the dialogue started, create a process flow of your users process and see if you understand gaps or notice where can redesign or develop a different concept idea that would eliminate some of those bad things from happening. You can also reach out to a quality engineer or reliability engineer for help. You can also reach out to me, visit quality during design.com and subscribe Let's prune the development process. Let's use quality as a strategic asset to product development and go from the old way of doing things to a better way. So we get better success. If you like the content in this episode, visit quality during design.com, where you can subscribe to the weekly newsletter to keep in touch. This has been a production of Dean enterprises. Thanks for listening.