Scale-up of a high technology manufacturing startup : failure tracking, analysis, and resolution through a multi-method approach

Abstract

Product reliability, quality, and performance are essential for all companies, especially high technology manufacturing startups looking to scale-up successfully. Company image and reputation can be heavily impacted by product failures. The cost of failures in-house and at the customer will only increase as a company scales up. Failure mitigation is critical to the success of a product and its company throughout the entire product lifecycle. This thesis proposes an ideal Failure Mitigation Strategy (FMS) that provides a methodology and framework with linear process workflow and easy to follow steps that lead to the reduction of cost from failures. Establishing a strong FMS will assist the company in learning from their failures while reducing the total number and average cost of failure events. The ideal FMS was tailored to and implemented at New Valence Robotics Corporation (NVBOTS) in Boston, Massachusetts, as a case study. The ideal FMS consists of failure tracking, failure analysis, and multi-method failure resolution. Failure events are first observed and properly documented via the failure tracking system. Failure tracking data is then processed during failure analysis using a total cost model to automatically prioritize and down select the most impactful failure event types. Root cause analysis is then performed on the top priority failure event types. Finally a robust multi-method failure resolution methodology uses an economical combination of design and process changes along with testing to eliminate or reduce the cost of those failures. Over 200 failure events were tracked, including 50 unique failure event types, accounting for over $75,000 in costs at NVBOTS. A unified and improved tracking system was implemented at NVBOTS along with a powerful analysis framework. Failure analysis was performed, prioritizing the failures by total cost and a failure resolution framework was designed to implement the solutions to the top priority failure event types. The ideal Failure Mitigation Strategy offered in this thesis provides NVBOTS and other entities a framework that allows for full understanding of the current failure landscape as well as a systematic method to reduce the impact from failures through elimination and mitigation.