Reliability engineering work flow and application in the product development process

Reliability is a systematic work, and it must be embedded in the product development process to improve the inherent reliability, so a suitable reliability work flow is very important. Meanwhile, technical details are crucial to the achievement of reliability work, and multidisciplinary knowledge is generally used to direct or audit the design specifics. Therefore, the reliability work has two characteristics: systematic and technical. On the basis of the waterfall model of product development, a modified reliability work flow was introduced, which was established and embedded in the integrated product development model. In this work flow, we ensure the final achievement by controlling some key steps, such as the input of reliability requirement, system and sub-system level reliability design, key module and device reliability testing, evaluation and auditing, and etc. We guarantee the quality of every steps work by defining and regularizing the role responsibilities and work details, thus improve the overall output of reliability work. In order to enhance its operational characteristic, some work was modified or simplified according to the company situation. For example, we emphasize reliability requirements must have two key characteristics: quantitative and decomposable. After near two years implementation, the defects of new products reduced by 10%, and the customer satisfaction increased form 85% to 90%, which shows that this work flow is suitable to our company. It can be expected reasonably that the reliability work flow will be more effective and robust by further modification and standardization as time goes, and the products reliability level will be more and more higher.