Quality and innovation in product process design

¶ … Engineering Qs

Concurrent engineering, as the name implies, involves the simultaneous designing of various components of a given product. Essentially, different teams working on different parts of a complex final product -- such as an automobile, for instance -- work in unison on the various parts of their product, ideally reaching completion at approximately the same time. This is in contrasts to sequential engineering, in which the various components of a complex final product are designed separately, one after the other, which can be much more costly and inefficient than concurrent engineering for a variety of direct and indirect reasons.

In concurrent engineering, frequent communication between groups leads to fewer needs to redesign elements as the project moves forward -- all components are designed with an accurate and current awareness of how the whole will fit together. There is also a significant time savings, which of course translates to cost savings, when concurrent engineering is employed; different teams working simultaneously necessarily complete projects faster than independent teams working in sequence. Customer involvement in the design process is also often more possible with concurrent engineering, leading to greater utility in the final product.

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One of the many methods that can be utilize to determine why an engineered system might have failed, and what other failures might be caused, is a fault tree analysis, or FTA. The FTA is a tool that graphically maps out the elements in a given system that contributed or might have contributed to a system failure. It essentially maps out the events, whether normal or abnormal, that can or have occurred in a system, and also shows the interconnections between the components of a system and the ways in which the system might be disrupted.

The essential goal of fault tree analysis is to determine the cause of system failures in the event of a past failure, or as a preemptive tool to determine the probabilities of failure based on specific events. By mapping out the events and components of a system, an FTA can be used to calculate these probabilities and so point out point in the system that might leave it more susceptible to failure. The FTA has both a preventative and a post-mortem function, then, and few would disagree that the former is the more impressive and necessary of the two.

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