RELIABILITY CAPABILITY ASSESSMENT METHODOLOGY
SANJAY TIKU and MICHAEL PECHT
CALCE Electronic Products And Systems Center,
University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA.
ABSTRACT
The rapid pace of technological developments and the globalization of supply chains have made electronics manufacturers dependent upon worldwide suppliers who provide them with parts or subassemb lies. Currently, many manufacturers have to wait until they get the products to assess if they are reliable. This can be an expensive iterative process. As an alternative, it is necessary to evolve a methodology that can help manufacturers to assess their potential suppliers and/or suppliers to assess themselves with respect to their ability for developing and supplying reliable products.
This paper presents a set of key practices that can be used as benchmarks to assess whether an organization has the ability to design, develop and manufacture reliable electronic products. It defines this ability as the reliability capability of an organization and discusses the different capability maturity levels. The auditing process for reliability capability assessment is provided and the possible causes for capability limitation are identified.
1. Introduction
The electronics market environment is characterized presently by high volatility, over or under capacity supply
cycles, rapid obsolescence of parts and technologies, and instant globalisation of information. Institutional and individual customers have better and broader knowledge of products and services. They are more aware of safety and environmental issues, and want minimum life cycle cost for products. Quality is regarded as a basic requisite,and reliability is the expected norm. Consolidation and outsourcing of businesses is occurring at the same time.
The globalization of electronics manufacturing has created new encumbrances for the industry. The profit margins are slimming due to competition, and the consumers are seeking extended warranty periods. In some cases, no
product returns are expected, leaving no room for error for the manufacturers.
For ensuring reliability and preventing failure, electronics manufacturers have to provide after sales services, and have to increase design and manufacturing efforts. Thisamounts to added costs due to increased investment on
testing and risk informed technology insertion of new technologies, shorter lead times and push for performance
improvement.
To be competitive, manufacturers need to know how things fail, in addition to knowing how things work.
Reliability of products in field is a primary concern for most industries after the quality systems have been
optimised to control in-house variabilities. However, the presence of a scheme to validate the ability of any
manufacture to produce reliable product or service is still a nebulous area. Although a lot of work has been done, and a number of failure prediction methodologies (FPMs) and Physics-of-Failure based failure models are available for the reliability prediction of systems [9], there are none in place for measuring the robustness, or the flexibility of an organization to design in, manufacture in, or test in reliability, and to do so consistently.
Having a reliability capability assessment methodology for an organization provides a pre-facto assurance about
goods and services before they are delivered for use.
Creating a benchmarking methodology for reliability will also set standards for opportunity and competition.
2. Reliability capability
A manufacturer’s capability firstly to “design for reliability” and secondly to implement a reliable design
through manufacturing and testing is important to the customer. Measuring the performance of an electronics
manufacturer yields important information about the likelihood that the company will provide a reliable product. For electronics manufacturers with worldwide suppliers, a metric is required so they can evaluate the ability of suppliers to provide reliable products. This ability is defined as reliability capability:
“Reliability capability is the measure of an electronics manufacturer’s ability to identify and understand its reliability – related objectives and the effectiveness of the processes and practices used by the organization to meet those objectives.”
