Product Maturity, Volume 2. Franck Bayle

reliability, his field of expertise, and I – having always wanted to maintain the link between quality and reliability – would try to establish a connection with the standards.

      Indeed, thanks to those who trained me as a quality engineer, I have always known that quality assurance should never be dissociated from dependability. I therefore felt instantly motivated by the opportunity to contribute to disseminating the acquired knowledge by means of a book. The subject system maturity can be mastered both through experience and through training.

      It is often the failures or non-quality observed during the development or operation of a system that indicate to us that our patterns of thinking lack dimension.

      However, in order to find an appropriate response to prevent these unexpected and feared events, and to be able to control them in the best way possible when they do occur, it is important to master quality risk management techniques. Risk management begins with risk prevention, the focus of this book.

      In order to understand the problem of system maturity as a whole, before addressing the actual techniques used, it is necessary to put it in context. This context is provided by the quality standards for the systems.

      Having trained as a general engineer within the Department of Energy and Environmental Engineering (GEn) at INSA Lyon, I then gained experience as a quality specialist, and have been a dependability supervisor since 1989. Franck therefore asked me to present the standards environment and the links that tie it to maturity, which the reader will find in Chapter 2 of his previous book, Product Maturity 1.

      Serge ZANINOTTI

      Thales

      Quality Expert

      November 2021

      Acknowledgements

      This book would certainly not have been possible without the contribution of certain persons. I therefore want to thank, first, my main supervisors throughout my career with Thales: Jean Riaillon, Laurent Portrait and Claude Sarno, who gave me the means to gain this experience.

      For everything related to maturity, a special thank you goes to Serge Zaninotti, quality expert with Thales, and also the author of Chapter 2 of my previous book, Product Maturity 1, on the notion of maturity and the “quality” aspects, and to Serge Parbaud of Thales for his advice and always appropriate corrections. I would also want to extend my warmest thanks to Patrick Carton from Thales Global Service for the passionate technical exchanges we have had in recent years, his always apt remarks, his support and his listening.

      Furthermore, I wish to thank Franck Davenel from DGA for our exchanges during PISTIS upstream study related to accelerated tests and burn-in, and to give my warmest thanks to Léo Gerville Réache for his valuable help.

      Finally, I wish to thank my entire family, and particularly my wife, not only for bearing with me, but also for encouraging me while writing this book.

      Introduction

      Reliability, availability, safety and so on are now major qualities that a product must have, irrespective of the industrial application field (automobile, avionics, rail, etc.) of its use. A significant literature related to these fields can be readily accessed, and is generally grouped under the umbrella concept of “dependability”.

      During the whole lifecycle of a product, from specification to operation by the end user, a large number of actions are implemented in order for it to meet the specified requirements. Reliability is the quantitative basis for dependability activities, as poor reliability can lead to insufficient availability, for example, although it should be reached as soon as the products are in service.

      The maturity of a product is therefore its capacity to reach the desired reliability level, from its launch into service until the end of its operation. Due to technical and economic challenges, it is very difficult to reach product maturity. Indeed, defects are very often generated during various phases of the lifecycle, reflected by failures that occur very early on in product operation (a manufacturing defect, for example), or during its operation (design flaw, integration flaw, etc.). This is particularly true for products whose service life is becoming longer (e.g. 30 years for components in the rail industry). It is important to note that this activity makes sense for maintained products, which are predominantly in industrial applications.

      There is abundant information on maturity, but this applies mostly to process implementation within a company, and it is therefore often at the project management level. Detailed literature describing the main theories (worst-case analysis, derating analysis, etc.) and practical techniques (accelerated tests, burn-in, etc.) for building product maturity is actually scarce, and many manufacturers often use obsolete standards, which, at best, they modify according to their experience.

      The main objective of this book is to fill this knowledge gap, which is often detrimental to many manufacturers.