Improving Product Reliability and Software Quality, 2nd Edition

Series Foreword First Edition

Modern engineering products, from individual components to large systems, must be designed and manufactured to be reliable. The manufacturing processes must be performed correctly and with the minimum of variation. All of these aspects impact upon the costs of design, development, manufacture, and use, or, as they are often called, the product's life cycle costs. The challenge of modern competitive engineering is to ensure that life cycle costs are minimized whilst achieving requirements for performance and time to market. If the market for the product is competitive, improved quality and reliability can generate very strong competitive advantages. We have seen the results of this in the way that many products, particularly Japanese cars, machine tools, earthmoving equipment, electronic components, and consumer electronic products have won dominant positions in world markets in the last 30–40 years. Their success has been largely the result of the teaching of the late W. E. Deming, who taught the fundamental connections between quality, productivity, and competitiveness. Today this message is well understood by nearly all the engineering companies that face the new competition, and those that do not understand lose position or fail.

The customers for major systems, particularly the US military, drove the quality and reliability methods that were developed in the West. They reacted to a perceived low achievement by imposing standards and procedures, ...