1.
DRAGON INNOVATION, INC.
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CLASS 9: QUALITY
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SEPT 8, 2014
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WILLIAM DRISLANE | VP ENGINEERING | @DRAGONINNOVATE | WWW.DRAGONINNOVATION.COM

2.
WHAT IS QUALITY?
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HOW DO I ACHIEVE IT?

3.
What is Quality?
1. Customer-Based Fitness for use, meeting customer
expectations.
2. Manufacturing-Based Conforming to design, specifications, or
requirements. Having no defects.
3. Product-Based The product has something that other
similar products do not that adds value.
4. Value-Based The product is the best combination of
price and features.
5. Transcendent It is not clear what it is, but it is
something good...
from http://mot.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/mt322/Whatis.htm

4.
The Price of Failure - Safety
M16 Rifle
• “We left with 72 men in our platoon and
came back with 19. Believe it or not, you
know what killed most of us? Our own rifle.
Practically every one of our dead was found
with his [M16] torn down next to him
where he had been trying to fix it.”- Marine
Corps Rifleman, Vietnam.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M16_rifle

5.
The Price of Failure - Safety
Ford Pinto Gas Tank Explosion
• Design defect known prior to production
• Cost to remedy $11 per vehicle, according to Ford’s
cost-benefit analysis justifying not fixing the problem.
• At least 27 people died and more were injured.
• $ 6MM awarded in just one lawsuit
• Ford had to recall and repair 2 million vehicles
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto

6.
The Price of Failure - Economics
• Example – Consumer Product
• Sales - $ 100MM
• Profits – $ 10MM (10%)
• Retail return rate increase from budgeted 5%
to 15% ->Zero profits
• A product recall could easily cost $ 15MM
and put the company into severe economic
difficulty

7.
The Benefits of Success
• High-quality products command higher prices,
deliver higher profits, and build brand value for
their owners:
• Honda, Toyota
• BMW, Mercedes
• Apple
• Google
• FedEx, DHL

8.
Design is the Ultimate
Constraint
• Manufacturing quality can only live up to
design quality, but not beyond.
• What you design is as good as the product
will ever be.
• The folks downstream cannot fix any
problems you create, except through re-design,
which was your job in the first
place.

9.
Succeeding Despite Your
Management
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/06/sci_nat_1986_challenger_disaster/html/1.stm
http://www.westga.edu/~jstrickl/webquests/challenger1.html
http://www.space-video.info/shuttle/challenger-sts51l.html

10.
Challenger Explosion
• O-ring failure on solid rocket booster led to catastrophic failure of the shuttle main fuel
tank.
• No data existed on o-ring performance below 53 F.
• Engineers had established a ‘red line’ minimum temperature of 40 F.
• Ambient temperature during the night before the morning launch reached a low of 18 F.
• Ambient temperature at time of launch was 31 F.
• Heavy ice was all over the support structures and launch pad.
• Previous missions had experienced partial o-ring failure under much more benign
conditions. These seals were a ‘criticality 1’ component – it is not allowed to rely on
the backup o-ring to meet safety requirements.
• During a pre-launch meeting, engineers had expressed concern about potential failures.
• The decision to launch was made anyway.
àWHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

11.
DESIGNING IT RIGHT

12.
Anticipating All Possible Uses
• The customer does not read your specifications
and has his own ideas about how to use your
product.
• 10/12 pages in the manual for a power tool
are all about “do not”…
• Inadvertent or unintended effects of the product
• Numerous examples from the drug and
chemical industries.

13.
Characterizing Problems
• Severity
• Personal injury or perception of same
• Property damage
• Product return
• Irritation and dissatisfaction
• Likelihood
• Probability of occurrence

14.
Characterizing Problems
• Detectability – is the hazard readily apparent, or hidden?
• Examples:
• Sharp knife
• Hidden sharp edge on handle
• Garment steamer valve trigger
• http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml02/02529.html
àHidden hazards are the most dangerous and result in the
biggest penalties

15.
Designing Safe Products
• What is an acceptable level of hazard?
• Suppose you have 3 MM products shipped
• What is an acceptable risk of fire?
• Intrinsic Safety
• Example – toaster oven design
• Counter-example – coffee maker
• Example – multi-voltage power supplies/chargers
• Redundancy vs. Fake Redundancy
• True redundancy is obtained when the first failure of a
redundant element can be detected.
• POST (Power On Self Test) is a very powerful tool.

16.
Brief Introduction to FMEAs
• Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
is a systematic tool used to ferret out
potential failure modes that would
otherwise be missed, and ensure that they
get addressed.

17.
DESIGNING RELIABILITY
INTO A PRODUCT

18.
Just Another Engineering
Discipline
• Engineering operates within multiple constraints:
• Cost budget
• Weight and volume budgets
• Performance budgets
• Power
• Waste heat
• …and Quality and Reliability budgets.

19.
Failure Budgeting
• Example – You are designing a vacuum cleaner. How
reliable does it need to be?
• The allowed rate of retail returns is 4%.
• Non-defective returns are estimated to be 2.4%
• Defective returns are budgeted to be 1.6%
• 0.55% is budgeted for unanticipated problems
• 0.65% is budgeted for factory quality, per AQL
• 0.40% is left over for actual defects in the
warranty period

20.
Failure Budgeting
Component Budgeted Warranty
Failure Rate
Suction Motor 0.05%
Brush Motor 0.10%
Belt 0.05%
AC Cord 0.10%
Switch 0.05%
Hose 0.05%
Total 0.40%

21.
Where Did the Name Six Sigma
Come From?
• Motorola found that, in order to build a product such as a cell
phone and achieve high levels of quality without having to sort and
scrap bad products, a very high level of component quality was
required:
• +/- Six standard deviations of the component’s natural quality
distribution had to fit within the values required for proper
function. This corresponds to a nominal failure rate of 2 ppb, but
reality will be worse, and 4.3 ppm is assumed.
• Example – a resistor is required to have a resistance between 100
and 112 ohms for a cell phone to function properly. A large batch
of resistors is tested and found to have a mean value of 106 ohms
and a standard deviation of 1 ohm. The requirement is satisfied.

22.
Effect of Parts Count and Failure
Rates
Reliable products require counter-intuitive,
almost absurdly high levels of component
reliability.
àMany times, most life tests you can afford
to run should have zero failures.

23.
Failure Distributions and Their
Implications
from http://www.asknumbers.com/WhatisReliability.aspx

24.
Early vs. Late Failures
• MTBF is not the only, or even the most important, reliability
measurement
• The distribution of failures over time, independent of MTBF, is
very important
• Consistency and repeatability drive down early failures and
decrease warranty costs.
• Improving consistency and repeatability is often much cheaper
than using more expensive components