Reliability in a time-driven product development process

Abstract

Fierce competition in the marketplace has led to industry giving a high priority to achieving time-to-market profitability. This results in an increasing pressure to introduce new products in a shorter time. At the same time, owing to new technological innovations, the complexity of the products increases as well. An additional pressure is that the customers also expect a high reliability of these complex and sometimes expensive products. This means that increasingly complex products have to be developed in a shorter time with higher levels of quality and reliability. In this paper we demonstrate by use of a case study how quality and reliability can be managed in a time-driven product development process (PDP). A general PDP is discussed first, then the case study is given, and finally it is discussed in general how high reliability can be combined with short time to market.