Design for Reliability

Preface

Design for reliability (DFR) has become a worldwide goal, regardless of the industry and market. The best organizations around the world have become increasingly intent on harvesting the value proposition for competing globally while significantly lowering life cycle costs. The DFR principles and methods are aimed proactively to prevent faults, failures, and product malfunctions, which result in cheaper, faster, and better products. In Japan, this tool is used to gain customer loyalty and customer trust. However, we still face some challenges. Very few engineering managers and design engineers understand the value added by design for reliability; they often fail to see savings in warranty costs, increased customer satisfaction, and gain in market share.

These facts, combined with the current worldwide economic challenges, have created perfect conditions for this science of engineering. This is an art also because many decisions have to be made not only on evidence-based data, but also on engineering creativity to design out failure at lower costs. Readers will be delighted with the wealth of knowledge because all contributors to this book have at least 20 years hands-on experience with these methods.

The idea for this book was conceived during our participation in the IEEE Design for Reliability Technical Committee. We saw the need for a DFR volume not only for hardware engineers, but also for software and system engineers. The traditional books on reliability engineering ...