Chapter 9
Essential Reliability Technology Disciplines in Manufacturing
What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.
Aristotle
9.1 Overview
The evolving range of electronic product types, production volumes and outsourcing strategies, has given rise to the need to create manufacturing processes of ever-increasing flexibility. The high-volume/specialist-product manufacturing community benefits from the advantage of daily process quality and reliability feedback and consequent high first-time yield achievement. On the other hand, organisations that are required to manufacture relatively small batches of a variety of product types face the challenge of meeting short setup and breakdown times combined with the need to achieve a necessary level of process control that does not benefit from the advantage of high volume statistical analysis. In spite of this challenge, total process control must be achieved if in-service failure-fee reliability targets are to be met.
Opinion is divided on the relative contribution to product reliability provided by design and production. Some say that reliability is more dependent on the quality of the design than it is upon the quality of manufacture. In the author's experience, design and production have a roughly equal contribution to make to the delivery of product reliability. A poor design, however, is most often more costly to correct than an unsatisfactory manufacturing process. An essential element of the production capability metric is embedded ...
