What is the difference between quality and reliability?
If the product fails on the user side after leaving the factory, it is a reliability problem. This division is not what I said. It was first discovered by the US military after World War II. The reason for the matter was: In the early days of the Korean War, the U.S. military discovered that airborne electronic equipment qualified in military factories was transported to the Korean battlefield. A large number of malfunctions occurred just after or shortly after the installation, which seriously affected the number of aircraft. Weakened the combat effectiveness of the US military.
In 1950, the US military immediately established an electronic equipment reliability advisory group, known in history as the AGREE group (AGREE is the abbreviation of Advisory Group on the Reliability of Electronic Equipment). This group issued a report on “Reliability of Electronic Equipment” in 1957. It pointed out from the root that reliability is essentially a design problem, and the reliability of products cannot be guaranteed by quality inspection alone!
The product formation process has to go through two stages: the design process and the manufacturing process (t<0 in the figure). The design process determines the degree of reliability that the product can reach. The manufacturing process can only be infinitely close but it is extremely difficult to reach the design. Reliability, and the reliability of the product in use (t>0 stage) can only be infinitely close to the reliability of the manufacturing completion time (t=0 time). This is the objective law revealed by the investigation report of the AGREE team. This law is universal, regardless of whether the company knows the reliability or whether it has carried out a quantitative expression of reliability, it is of guiding significance.
Innovative enterprises go through a positive design process, and must consider the reliability issues in the user’s use process during the design process, and carry out “reliable design” or “reliability design”. The former is qualitative and the latter is quantitative. In order to ensure the high reliability of the design. The process design, material inspection, and supply chain management of the manufacturing process are all based on reliable design or reliability design conversion, forming a complete chain from the source point (user demand) to the end point (user use).
The reverse design process experienced by the tracking company, imitating the benchmark product to achieve functional performance, then transferred to the manufacturing process. Because there is no process from user requirements to reliable design, it is not clear at what level the reliability of the design is. Especially compared with tracking and benchmarking products, the supply chain of raw materials and components has changed. The company does not know whether the reliability of this imitated design has reached the level of the original design. Under this circumstance, no matter how hard the enterprise is to check the quality of the manufacturing process, it cannot make up for the inherent deficiencies of reliability design.
Of course, there are still quite a few companies. There is a big gap between the manufacturing process of imitating products and the manufacturing process of standard products. In this case, the reliability of product manufacturing cannot be guaranteed. The low reliability of use is an inevitable phenomenon.
