Reliability Tests as a Strategy for the Sustainability of Products and Production Processes—A Case Study

Abstract

Nowadays, manufacturing companies are looking to improve their sustainability to respond to the market and customers’ demands for sustainable products. Therefore, companies must improve their production processes to increase sustainability (economic, environmental, social, technological, efficiency, energy, performance management, manufacturing, and quality). This paper presents a case study of a manufacturing company located in Tijuana (Mexico) that produces wired and wireless communication devices. Previously, this company developed four projects to produce Universal Serial Buses (USB) and their duration should have been no more than 2 weeks; however, these lasted from 2.7 to 4.5 weeks. Moreover, different types of defects were also identified and, currently, the company is carrying out a project to develop a headset model. This research aims to demonstrate the application of reliability testing for the sustainability of products and manufacturing processes by reducing project development times and defects. The failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA), design of experiments (DOE), and analysis of variance (ANOVA) techniques are applied. The results indicated that the time between the start and completion of the headset project was 1.8 weeks, which is below the company’s limit of 2 weeks and, additionally, defects were reduced significantly compared to previous projects. Based on the findings, it is concluded that applying statistical tools improves the sustainability of production processes and products. This implies that manufacturing companies can increase their sustainability indexes by reducing their processes/tasks times and the number of defective parts, increasing quality and customer satisfaction.