Achieving high reliability and quality in the acquisition of US DoD electronics

Describes a study effort to develop a handbook that provides guidelines to enable significant and continuous improvement in the reliability and quality of acquisition of US Department of Defense (DoD) electronic systems. The guidelines will focus on describing a new proactive role for reliability engineering which will help ensure built-in reliability. The program consists of the following major tasks. A new process will be defined that implements total quality management (TQM) in all phases of the DoD electronic systems acquisition process. The current DoD reliability process is described. In addition, recommendations will be made to retain, modify, or eliminate the current processes based on how they affect product reliability and quality. A comprehensive, self-contained handbook will be developed that includes TQM implementation procedures And step-by-step examples. The progress is discussed