0000000000647369
AUTHOR
B Bergman
Focus on failure avoidance and risk reduction through Variation Mode and Effect Analysis
Variation Mode and Effect Analysis (VMEA) is a quality improvement tool initially thought to help product development engineers focusing on variation. The method was inspired by the wide use of Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) in business and industry and the increased attention on robust design. However, FMEA is based on the concept of failure while VMEA is developed on the concept of variation, i.e. it implies a step further toward the awareness of variation and its implications in terms of risk and failures. VMEA helps identifying, scrutinizing and measuring the sources of variation and the way they channel through and impact on important characteristics of the system under study.…
A Robustness Approach to Reliability
Reliability of products is here regarded with respect to failure avoidance rather than probability of failure. To avoid failures, we emphasize variation and suggest some powerful tools for handling failures due to variation. Thus, instead of technical calculation of probabilities from data that usually are too weak for correct results, we emphasize the statistical thinking that puts the designers focus on the critical product functions. Making the design insensitive to unavoidable variation is called robust design and is handled by (i) identification and classification of variation, (ii) design of experiments to find robust solutions, and (iii) statistically based estimations of proper safe…