Improving Product Quality

By barb schmitz | Published: June 29, 2011

 

Product development engineers and designers are human, and as we all know, to err is human, right? Unfortunately in the increasingly competitive world of product design, making errors in the design of a new product can cost a company plenty in the form of costly reworks, expensive recalls, lost development time, lost revenue and possibly customers, if bad products make their way to market. Increased liability and warranty costs add to the pressure manufacturers face to reduce errors.

One way to head off potential problems is to shift design verification and validation methods from the end of the design process to the beginning of development, when errors are fixed with the least expense and effort. At this point, designs still reside in digital form so they are easily changeable and should be iterated continuously to assure the design is fully optimized. After all, design validation is most useful when there is time in the development cycle to integrate the results back into the design.

Sometimes this is difficult to do, however, because performing a complete design validation is a detailed, methodical, and time-consuming task. The key is to use design methodologies and tools that focus on ‘what if’ type analysis early in the design cycle, without derailing development schedules. Design verification and validation are both crucial steps in ensuring that a new product will ultimately meet, or possibly exceed, customers’ needs and expectations.

Integrating verification and validation early in the design cycle delivers significant returns: improved product quality, reduced prototyping costs, and shortened design cycles. Design verification assures that products fulfill the requirements specified for them, while validation confirms that a product will fulfill its intended use or purpose. In other words, verification assures that the product was built correctly, while validation assures that the manufacturer built the right product.

Both processes—verification and validation—provide periodic confirmation that the design is headed in the right direction, reducing the chance of designs making a wrong turn, in terms of meeting design requirements and specifications, which could lead to further errors down the line when changes come at a much higher cost, both in terms of time and money.  Verification and validation provide engineers with a variety of possible feedback or output that they can incorporate back into the design. This feedback might include whether or not the design met requirements or specifications; descriptions of failure modes; summarized test results; and recommendations for improvement.

The first step is to determine the means by which the requirements will be validated. For some manufacturers, especially those who manufacture electromechanical products, this step will involve identifying the testing required for mechanical, electrical, and embedded software as well as the system as a whole. Testing facilities and resources must then be secured, and physical tests run or digital models developed and simulations run.

Design requirements are translated into a set of test cases with loads and constraints that can either be measured physically or digitally across all functional domains (electrical, mechanical, and software). Once the tests and simulations are run, the results of both the physical or digital tests are documented in reports, indicating whether the product satisfied both its requirements and specifications.

Implementing verification and validation techniques—either digitally or physically—early in the design process enables engineers to ask the “what if” questions when the answers bear the most fruit. Having the answers to all those questions empowers engineers to make the best decisions that guide designs in the right direction from the start and ultimately result in better, higher-quality products.