Reliability-oriented quality control approach for production process based on RQR chain

Abstract

Reliability assurance is a series of activities that ensure that the product reliability requirements be realised in a product life cycle. However, as reliability assurance activities are usually only implemented in design and usage, the integration of reliability assurance with quality control in production has not attracted the attention it deserved, thereby hindering production performance improvement to satisfy increasingly stringent customer requirements. To this end, this paper proposes a reliability-oriented quality control framework to integrate quality control and reliability assurance in production according to the principles of total quality management (TQM). Firstly, from the integrated quality and reliability assurance perspective, the RQR chain is proposed to represent the bidirectional relationships among the three basic management objects in a production process, namely, manufacturing system reliability (R), manufacturing process quality (Q), and the produced product reliability (R). Secondly, a reliability-oriented quality control framework for the production process based on the RQR chain is presented to provide the control clue for a manufacturing enterprise. Thirdly, the validity of the proposed approach is verified in a vehicle engine manufacturing enterprise of China. The proposed RQR chain as a decision-support model for TQM is eventually proven effective in promoting the integration of quality control and reliability assurance in production.