Industrial practice in designing for quality

Abstract

The improvement of the quality of design and the reduction of failure related cost is seen as a crucial competitive requirement for UK manufacturing industry. To achieve these goals, industry must adopt current methods in support of design for quality (DFQ) for analysing potential problems and predicting quality, and integrate these effectively with the appropriate stages of their new product development process. The utilisation and success rate of these techniques in UK companies is, however, relatively low compared to those in countries such as the USA and Japan. In this paper, the fundamental concepts and key areas of opportunity in design improvement using the main DFQ support techniques are reviewed and a framework for their application and integration is presented to support concurrent product development. The typical experiences and problems concerning the application and implementation of techniques are discussed and areas where new research should be directed are touched on so that DFQ techniques may better enhance industrial practice in the achievement of high quality products.