One of the main activities of the quality assurance division to which the authors belong is approval of new products, in which a new product is evaluated as to whether it will stand the test of actual use in the field. Evaluation conditions were formerly based on specifications, but evaluation took a long time and left room for improvement in regard to accuracy. To reform the engineering process, eliminate backtracking, and reduce development lead times, we had to reexamine our evaluation methods. As a first step taken in a challenge to develop a "test-free" methodology, specification-based evaluation tests were eliminated. They were replaced by a functional benchmarking method in which the intrinsic function of a new product is measured, a mixture of noise factors derived from a series of studies is added, and the S/N ratio of the product is compared with that of an existing field-proven product. This method is expected to reduce evaluation time drastically and ensure better assessment accuracy.
