Product Assurance

Abstract

Product assurance is concerned with economy, performance, and reliability. It provides the tools and techniques with which the project engineer may design economically optimal systems and equipment, and with which he may allocate his own efforts economically. Product assurance puts "reliability" into a realistic economic perspective. This report outlines the problems of growing product complexity, earlier obsolescence, and design immaturity, and recommends specific feedback loops to maximize maturity at each design phase. A centralized Assurance group digests and organizes data from all sources and develops design "tools," providing a broad service to design engineers. Management is provided a Product Assurance Report showing progressive cost reduction and reliability improvement, both in terms of annual savings to the product user.