ABSTRACT
Critical for Total Manufacturing Assurance (TMA) is being attentive to reliability control, safety control, quality control, lean manufacturing, design for manufacturability, and manufacturing effectiveness in order to maintain inherent designed-in performance levels. Transferring a product design to manufacturing causes inherent levels to be degraded via material processing and workmanship stresses and flaws. Controls are necessarily integrated into the overall manufacturing process to maintain the product reliability, safety, and quality levels as close as possible to designed-in levels. Reliability control focuses on maintaining the inherent level of product reliability designed-in and predicted. The objective is to integrate into the manufacturing system and process design specialized screens and supporting tests and inspections that eliminate, or minimize, product latent defects moving to the market place. Safety control addresses both the product and the manufacturing system design. Analyses such as failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA) and fault tree analysis (FTA) are methods for assessing product and manufacturing system safety, as well as human factors. Quality control focuses primarily on the observable patent defects. Statistical techniques are used to monitor product quality, including control charting as part of statistical process control (SPC).
