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Design for Reliability and Quality

At CLARET we understand the reliability and quality engineering challenges that face manufacturers working with novel technologies. We believe that designing reliability and quality into a product can help reduce development time and cost, improve performance and better satisfy the customer. Our preferred approach to optimising product reliability and quality is to blend the principles and techniques of Design for Reliability (DFR) with aspects of Design for Six Sigma (DFSS).

What is DFR?

DFR is a process undertaken during a product’s design phase and before a physical prototype is produced to ensure the reliability of a component, device or system.

What is DFSS?

Six sigma is a business-process management approach to improve existing processes, systems and products’ quality by eliminating defects. Although closely aligned to six sigma and sharing many of its advanced tools, DFSS seeks instead to influence a product’s design and development phases by engineering in the efficiencies associated with Six Sigma methodologies prior to a product’s implementation. In this way, causes of variation and defect are identified and removed before the product reaches the market, ensuring the development of a high-quality product that is capable of meeting customer performance requirements from the outset.

Bringing together DFR and DFSS

CLARET’s has expertise in applying a number of key DFR and DFSS techniques including:

  • Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA)
  • Robust design
  • Life testing
  • Accelerated lifetime testing
  • Simulation
  • Statistical optimisation
  • Environmental and usage conditions
  • Reliability estimations
  • Fault tree analysis
  • Reliability requirements and goals analysis
  • Determining end-user environment and usage conditions
  • Reliability risk identification, evaluation and reduction strategy
  • Poka yoke
  • Design of experiments
  • Error proofing
  • Statistical analysis
  • Field data analysis and evaluation
  • Design reliability validation

Using these techniques, together with extensive knowledge of device and material physics at molecular level, we can recommend improvements to design, underlying science and / or manufacturing processes that can help ensure customer product reliability, quality, and life expectancy requirements are achieved.

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