DESIGN FOR

RELIABILITY

CIELO
GRAGG
MAIGUE
REYES
SILVESTRE

WHAT IS RELIABILITY?
Elimination/avoidance of failure modes/mistakes
The probability that a product will perform its intended
function:
Under customer operating conditions
For a specified life
In a manner that meets or exceeds customer
expectations

Basically, a reliable product is robust and mistake-free

WHAT IS DESIGN FOR

RELIABILITY?
DFR describes the entire set of tools that support
product and process design (typically from early in the
concept stage all the way through to product
obsolescence) to ensure that customer expectations
for reliability are fully met throughout the life of the
product with low overall life-cycle costs.
DFR is a systematic, streamlined, concurrent
engineering program in which reliability engineering is
weaved into the total development cycle. It relies on
an array of reliability engineering tools along with a
proper understanding of when and how to use these
tools throughout the design cycle.

WHY DESIGN FOR

RELIABILITY?
Reliability can make or break the long-term success of
a product:
Too high reliability will cause the product to be too
expensive
Too low reliability will cause warranty and repair
costs to be high and therefore market share will be
lost

MAJOR PHASES OF A
TYPICAL DFR PROGRAM
Define
Identify
Analyze and Assess
Quantify and Improve
Validate
Monitor and Control

DEFINE
The purpose of this stage is to clearly and quantitatively
define the reliability requirements and goals for a product as
well as the end-user product environmental/usage conditions.
These can be at the system level, assembly level, component
level or even down to the failure mode level.

TOOLS:
Goal Setting; Develop Metrics; Benchmarking; Gap Analysis;
Reliability Program Plan Writing; Quality Function Deployment
(QFD)

IDENTIFY
In this stage, a clearer picture about what the product
is supposed to do starts developing.

TOOLS:
Reliability Prediction (compare design alternatives,
identify preferred components and suppliers); Cost
Trade-offs; Tolerance evaluation; Better understanding
of customer specifications; Failure Modes and Effects
Analysis (FMEA); Fault Tree Analysis (FTA)

ANALYZE & ASSESS

It is important at this phase to address all the potential
sources of product (or system) failure.

TOOLS:
Finite Element Analysis (FEA); Physics of Failure (PoF);
Reliability Prediction; Reliability Block Diagram (RBD);
Engineering judgment, expert opinions, existing data;
Warranty Analysis of the existing products; Design
Review by Failure Mode (DRBFM); Stress-Strength
Analysis; FMEA updated

QUANTIFY AND
IMPROVE
In this stage, quantifying all of the previous work based
on test results will commence. By this stage,
prototypes should be ready for testing and more
detailed analysis. This involves an iterative process
where different types of tests are performed, the
results are analyzed, design changes are made, and
tests are repeated.
TOOLS:
Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT); Accelerated Life
Testing (ALT); Test to failure (Life data analysis);
Degradation analysis; Reliability Growth Process (if
enough data is available); Design Review Based on Test
Results (DRBTR); Design of Experiments (DOE); System

VALIDATE
In the Validate stage, a Demonstration Test can be used
to make sure that the product is ready for high volume
production.

TOOLS:
Design Validation (Including ALT and Reliability
Demonstration); Process Validation; Demonstration Test

MONITOR AND
CONTROL
Assure that the process remains unchanged and the
variations remain within the tolerances.

TOOLS:
Control Charts and Process Capability Studies (Cpk,
Ppk, etc.); Human Reliability; Continuous Compliance;
Field return analysis (warranty) and forecasting;
Ongoing reliability testing (ORT); Audits