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Volume 39 (2009)
- Issue 4 Pages 407-
- Issue 3 Pages 280-
- Issue 2 Pages 152-
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Volume 39, Issue 3
Displaying 1-11 of 11 articles from this issue
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Features
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Kazuyuki SUZUKIArticle type: Features 〔Establishment of Quality in Short-Term Development〕
2009 Volume 39 Issue 3 Pages 280-289
Published: July 15, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL RESTRICTED ACCESSA new approach to the assurance of reliability and safety (R & S) for industrial products with a shorter development period is presented. To build in R & S with a shorter development period into new products and new technologies, several activities are important. (1) Continuous improvement in the new product development system with a focus on R & S. (2) Establishment and utilization of a database with information about mechanisms of function achievement, failure mechanisms, and failure modes. (3) Creation of attractive quality by combining existing designs and/or existing technologies. (4) Concentration on 3H: henka (change), hajimete (first time challenge), and hisashiburi (long time no use). (5) Establishment and up-stream management of integrated interfaces of mechanical parts, electrical parts, and software. (6) Prompt and accurate collection and analysis of field-provided information on new products. (7) Feedback of all this information to new product development system and database. In this paper, the following five issues related to the implementation of these activities effectively and efficiently are discussed. 1. Prevention of problems by "prediction" for new technologies and new products. 2. Clarification and definition of "hazard" status for preventing R & S problems. 3. Closing of the gap between R & S in the product design stage and R & S in the customer usage stage. 4. Establishment of quality assurance system in advanced technological societies and assurance of its maintainability. 5. Information sharing and joint activities of customers, manufacturers, and administration for achieving R & S.View full abstractDownload PDF (1325K) -
Kenzo NAGAHARAArticle type: Features 〔Establishment of Quality in Short-Term Development〕
2009 Volume 39 Issue 3 Pages 290-295
Published: July 15, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL RESTRICTED ACCESSIn the matured market where too many competitive products exist, it is required to make its function and performance more attractive to achieve customer's delight by obtaining needs and requirements sensitively from customers and society in advance. Also, it is required to make management more effective such as man power savings as well as the shorter period of development from the view point of business environmental change. In order to meet the several requirements from the both aspects, it is necessary to elaborate making process itself continuously and to improve quality and increase speed of process improvement. By using the core of "process assurance" and "process networking", I would like to introduce the concept and case study for shorter period of development, the way of thinking for up-stream assurance.View full abstractDownload PDF (1217K) -
Kazuo TATEBAYASHIArticle type: Features 〔Establishment of Quality in Short-Term Development〕
2009 Volume 39 Issue 3 Pages 296-302
Published: July 15, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL RESTRICTED ACCESSAlthough various efforts have been made to shorten the period of new product development in many Japanese companies, the results have not been successful in the aspect of quality assurance. The author shows how Taguchi's "robust design method" is effective for preventing quality problems in design stage and shortening the period of new product development with several case studies.View full abstractDownload PDF (831K) -
Kojiro TOBITAArticle type: Features 〔Establishment of Quality in Short-Term Development〕
2009 Volume 39 Issue 3 Pages 303-308
Published: July 15, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL RESTRICTED ACCESSThe activities of Quality forming in the upper development process which has been tested in Omron Corporation is described. Three major ideas introduced in this paper were developed based upon failure causes, Human error, Organizational fault and Surroundings change. FMEA (Failure Mode Effective Analysis) is introduced as very powerful tool for Human error. But there is an issue that FMEA consumes a lot of time and the output is heavily depending on engineer's skill. To avoid poor FMEA output, compact Quality Intelligent Database which is integrated into 60 essential acquaintance has been formed from various failure and fault data in the past applying failure analysis and failure mechanism theory. SPI2 (Systematic Process Improvement & Innovation activity specially used in Omron Corporation, which is the extension of SPI: Software Process Improvement) is reported as effective approach against Organizational fault and 3C (Customer, Company and Competitor) evaluation is used as awakening assistance for Surroundings change. At the end of this paper, whole picture of Omron's Quality improvement activities is stated as reference.View full abstractDownload PDF (900K) -
Mutsumi YOSHINO, Ken NISHINAArticle type: Features 〔Establishment of Quality in Short-Term Development〕
2009 Volume 39 Issue 3 Pages 309-315
Published: July 15, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL RESTRICTED ACCESSMaking the product design period to shorten is hoped for, and then a lot of design parameters are fixed at the draft-drawing stage today. On the other hand, determination of some requirements of the products (ex: specific regulations for luminous intensity of headlights in the region where the vehicle is operated), which was not possible to decide in the drafting stage, is made in the detail-drawing stage. Then the regulation fitting is a compulsory procedure for parts industries. The regulation fitting is different from adjustment or calibration because it involves further improvement of product performance. However, unfortunately the regulation fitting procedure has not been established; therefore, it becomes also the cause of the turning back and the design change. They are serious problems for reduction of lead-time. In this article, some issues to solve in the regulation fitting and measures to cope with them partially are shown. The essential points of the measures are interactions between the control factors and noise factors.View full abstractDownload PDF (920K) -
Kenji OKUNA, Tsutomu TSUYAMAArticle type: Features 〔Establishment of Quality in Short-Term Development〕
2009 Volume 39 Issue 3 Pages 316-320
Published: July 15, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL RESTRICTED ACCESSQuality, cost, and delivery, (QCD) are most important elements in the product development. Since, quality issues have the biggest impact on our product development, recently, it is said that not only "Relapse prevention", but also "MIZENBOUSHI" is necessary. For that, it is important to have the business process where cross function team cooperates on design stage, and to foresee the problem effectively using past trouble information for preventing trouble beforehand. In this text, we explain the approach for MIZENBOUSHI activity in Hitachi from such a viewpoint.View full abstractDownload PDF (711K) -
Shinjiro YAMADAArticle type: Features 〔Establishment of Quality in Short-Term Development〕
2009 Volume 39 Issue 3 Pages 321-329
Published: July 15, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL RESTRICTED ACCESSUnder current challenging economic climate, the Japanese manufacturing industry needs to reassess its approach to product development. Until recently, the Japanese manufacturing industry believed that if quality products with high performance and functions were manufactured, sales will follow. Time has come to change this thought process. Specifically, distinction should be drawn between development processes for "innovative new products" and "modified new products". The latter is defined to be products that may be developed reusing previously established design procedures. 80% of the development falls under this category and ideas required for development of a "new quality product" are not needed in these circumstances. A new organization structure differentiating the "innovative new products" and "modified new product" development should be established. Views on development procedures using IT for the "modified new product" are presented and a new global development system is proposed.View full abstractDownload PDF (1587K)
Research Papers
Contributed Paper
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Md. Mesbahul ALAM, Kazuyuki SUZUKI, Watalu YAMAMOTOArticle type: Contributed Paper
2009 Volume 39 Issue 3 Pages 353-363
Published: July 15, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL RESTRICTED ACCESSA warranty database typically contains valuable field performance information obtained under actual operating conditions and is automatically updated whenever a customer requests repairs on a unit during the warranty period. However, it contains data on only those units that have been repaired under warranty; data (e.g., usage time) is not available for those units that have not failed during the warranty period. The current methods for estimating the lifetime parameters of products thus require gathering supplementary information for those units by, for example, conducting a follow-up study or by estimating the usage time distribution (such as mileage distance or copy volume) per specified calendar time. A method has now been developed that does not require such information, making it possible to estimate the reliability characteristics accurately using only failure information. It uses the "type" of the usage time distribution, which comes from previous literatures and the results of analyzing actual data sets. Maximum likelihood estimation is used for single-failure mode, and an iterative method is used for multiple-failure modes. This iterative method is applicable to analyze a general field data set, which consists of a lot of failure modes formulating a specified failure mode as a Weibull distribution and all other failure modes to which attention is not paid as an exponential distribution.View full abstractDownload PDF (1103K) -
Yasushi NAGATA, Daichi DOIArticle type: Contributed Paper
2009 Volume 39 Issue 3 Pages 364-375
Published: July 15, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL RESTRICTED ACCESSRT (Recognition Taguchi) method is the newest among MT (Mahalanobis Taguchi) system. Several application cases have been published, while the properties of RT method have not been studied theoretically so far. The calculation is not complicated and RT method seems to be an attractive procedure with original ideas. However, practitioners should be cautious when they apply it to continuous type data. This paper discusses the following viewpoints.
(1) The dimensions of all variables must be the same. Otherwise, one needs to translate the variables to non-dimension numbers.
(2) The distance used in RT method has an essentially inappropriate property. It takes some large value at the center of the unit space and attains zero at the point of different position from the center. When a new member comes from the center of the unit space, it would be decided that the member is outside of the unit space, which leads to be misleading.
(3) This paper proposes a new distance for RT system, which improves on the abovementioned inappropriate property. This new distance is zero at the center of the unit space, and then increases with variation as a member is getting further from the center.View full abstractDownload PDF (1460K)
Technical Note
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Takahisa IIDA, Takahiro FUKUSHIMA, Nobuo SHINOZAKIArticle type: Technical Note
2009 Volume 39 Issue 3 Pages 376-385
Published: July 15, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL RESTRICTED ACCESSDetection of abnormal items is discussed when both continuous and categorical variables are observed. Assuming the location model where continuous variables are multivariate normally distributed with common covariance matrix when categorical variables are observed, the problem of detecting abnormal items is formulated as a hypothesis testing problem. When all parameter values of the distribution for the normal group of items are known, it is shown that the distribution of the likelihood ratio test statistic is a mixture of shifted x^2 distributions. Based on this result, a detection method is constructed as a hypothesis testing procedure with exact significance level. For the case when only one dichotomous variable is included, some basic properties are shown on the conditional rejection probabilities for normal items. Further, a comparison is made with some other detection methods such as the modified Mahalanobis distance method which uses the Mahalanobis distance based on all variables. From the numerical evaluation of the power functions of the methods, it is observed that the proposed method performs better than the other ones for a wide range of parameter values.View full abstractDownload PDF (1212K)
Survey and Field Study
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Sadami SUZUKI, Shinsuke KITAMURA, Takao ENKAWA, Tanyanuparb ANANTANAArticle type: Survey and Field Study
2009 Volume 39 Issue 3 Pages 386-396
Published: July 15, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL RESTRICTED ACCESSIt has been known that New Product Development (NPD) is one of the most important issues to enhance competitiveness, and many researches have been speculated on successful NPD. This paper intends to investigate the impact of NPD competencies on financial performance. For analyzing the NPD competencies, New Product Development Scorecard (NPDSC) has been utilized as a self-evaluation tool for participated manufacturing companies in Japan. From NPDSC database, three factors, namely, "Development strategy and organization", "Development production technology" and "Utilization capability of tools and IT" were extracted as NPD competencies. Using the corresponding companies' financial bottom line indices, high correlations between these indices and NPD competencies were observed. At the same time, two business conditions such as production complexity and market uncertainty were taken up and a framework was developed to investigate those moderating effect on NPD competencies and financial bottom lines. From the results, both complexity and uncertainty could be considered as requirements for successful NPD. Particularly, correspondence to the complexity could be a trigger to achieve higher NPD competencies which can lead to enhanced managerial performance.View full abstractDownload PDF (1722K)
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