ABSTRACT
Manufacturing or quality departments are often held responsible for quality. These groups may expend substantial effort to try to ensure high quality to compensate for insufficient attention devoted to the inherent quality of the design. This chapter presents a list of proactive guidelines, procedures, and cultural perspectives that product development teams can use to design quality into products. It is better to proactively specify optimal tolerances for a robust design to ensure high quality by design. The Taguchi Method™ for robust design is a systematic way to optimize tolerances to achieve high quality at low cost. A product with good reliability has freedom from failure in use. The chapter presents guidelines for optimizing reliability by design. There are three phases in which products experience different reliability behavior: the infant mortality, useful life, and wearout phases, Poka-yoke can be used as a design methodology to mistake-proof the design so parts cannot be assembled wrong or products manufactured incorrectly.
