When trying to fit a probability distribution to quantitative results, sometimes the normal probability doesn't fit. Minitab has a wealth of distributions to pick from. Do you just pick whichever one Minitab tells you fits the best? Maybe not. Just because the distribution fits your data doesn't mean it's a good one to use. We review my top 3 distributions for product testing and some other ones that come up but may not be appropriate to use. We'll also share what you need to think about when picking a distribution.

The podcast blog includes useful links.

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ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.

You may have heard of QMS (Quality Management Systems) but are not sure how your activities fit in. Or, you’ve heard of QFD, ISO 9000, Six Sigma, Lean...these cryptic names that you’re not sure what they’re about. You may be doing activities under one of your company’s procedures and asking, “Why am I spending time on this?"  Sometimes it’s good to re-orient to the big picture. That’s what we’ll be doing in this episode: reorienting to the QMS.

We'll also talk about some of the standard Quality Management System philosophies:

• TQM (Total Quality Management)
• ISO 9000
• QFD (Quality Function Deployment)
• Six Sigma
• Lean
• Malcom Baldrige National Quality Award 

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ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.

Because of your role as a designer in product development, you have great input into the planning for what field (or real-use) data should be monitored for your product. We talk about this as post market surveillance, which is a typical term used for medical devices. This episode talks about how the post market surveillance engine follows the PDSA (plan-do-study-act) continuous improvement cycle, some expectations of post market surveillance systems, and what inputs designers have in its planning. 

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ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.

If we're not careful with or ignore failure modes, we can choose the wrong reliability model or statistical distribution. If our product performance is close to the required limits and/or we need a very accurate model, this could be a big problem.

We talk about the importance of failure modes and step-through a tensile-test example to explore these other topics:

• competing failure modes
• suspensions
• independent vs. dependent
• reliability block diagrams

The podcast blog includes extra useful information/links.

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If your team is still catching problems too late — let's talk.
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→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.

A danger of using slide decks for technical design reviews is loss of important technical information. In order to summarize something in a slide or slide deck, the presenter thins-out information without its raw data and divorces it from the plots, graphs, and other technical analyses.

Slide decks are useful to the presenter to pull together a meeting. Slide decks are terrible for the reviewers who need to review technical information and make decisions from it.

In this episode, I review some alternatives.

The podcast blog includes extra information, links, and citations.

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If your team is still catching problems too late — let's talk.
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→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.

Recent news highlights an accident involving a product with tragic results. This podcast explores this as cautionary tale and example outside of our own design house. The goal is to shift our perspectives to let us gain a better understanding of risk-based decisions. We also talk about allowing ourselves room to change our minds about risk acceptability when we learn new information, both during the design process and from the field.

The podcast blog includes extra links and updates.

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→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.

When we're trying to innovate, we can get trapped into the old thinking that the solution has to be out there somewhere. We need to think outside the box to find the solution to a problem.

We should stop brainstorming and, instead, think inside the box with Systematic Inventive Thinking. We use systematic approaches to do lots of things, and being innovative can be one of them, too.

This podcast blog talks about the shortcomings of group brainstorming sessions and a different approach to innovation.

The podcast blog includes works cited and extra information.

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→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.

HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Test) uses the weakest link mentality. We apply stresses beyond what our designs would normally see in the environment to make something fail. It's meant to be an iterative test program where you are testing, analyzing the results, determining the root cause, fixing the design, and then testing it, again.

This podcast reveals more about its roots, why you should perform HALT (or not), when in the design process it's best (hint: really early), and who likely needs to be involved. Also understand how HALT is different from ALT.

The podcast blog includes extra information and links.

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→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.

It takes a village to produce a design from concept to realization. Everyone along the way seems to think of risk a little bit differently. Designers are both directly and indirectly involved with all these risk management methods, but it's important to understand who is looking at what type of information. Why? Because of communication. One group might think that risk management is covered in the way they're thinking it should be, when in actuality it's not. 

This podcast will review risk management of other functional groups and how a designer's risk affects them.

• Business/Marketing risk management
• Project Manager risk management
• Supplier Management

As a designer you have an important job and a unique perspective to analyze risk of your design and a responsibility to communicate it so everyone can help reduce risks. 

The podcast blog includes a link to an infographic.

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If your team is still catching problems too late — let's talk.
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Get the full framework.
→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.

You have identified a potential failure in your design. It's a complicated failure that has multiple potential root causes, and some that are conditional. Is there a tool that can capture it all and help prioritize your reactions to get rid of this problem? Yes, there is: Fault Tree Analysis!

Learn what it is and how it can help you get a handle on that big failure.

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Support the show

If your team is still catching problems too late — let's talk.
→ Schedule a free discovery call: Dianna's calendar

Want insights like this?
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Get the full framework.
→ Pierce the Design Fog 

ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.