Improving Engineering Culture For Reliability, Quality & Testing in Automotive Engineering (Updated) 2016-01-0318
This paper will discuss the problem of improving engineering culture for development reliability, quality, and testing of the automotive industry product. The basic approach relates to other industries too.
The paper will consider why it is so important for engineers and managers, and how it relates to Systems Engineering, which simply stated is , a system which is an integrated composite of people, products, and processes that provides a capability to satisfy a stated need or objective.
One of the basic problems of management is strategic thinking.
Predicting is inaccurate when it is based on information obtained from using traditional approaches of accelerated life testing (ALT) data where the degradation (failure) processes differ substantially from the product’s degradation processes during service life under real world conditions. The paper will describe basic cultural issues of this situation, including engineering culture in the development of accelerated life testing (ALT), which is moving in two directions.
The author considers quality in a broad sense (including reliability, durability, maintainability, and others). An important interview with quality legend Joseph M. Juran, which relates to improving engineering culture and discusses the impact of manufacturing on the United States. Some components of this interview will be demonstrated in the paper.
As an example of developing engineering culture, the author considers FMEA, which is a type of reliability and quality analysis. Using FMEA does not mean automatically that it is a good component of high engineering culture, because there are mistakes in this usage. For the improvement of the process , one needs to learn the top FMEA mistakes that are described in this paper and not to use them. For the success of using this approach, it must be performed on the parts, by the correct team, during the correct time frame and with the correct procedures.
