| IVAC Corp. -- San Diego, CA |
IVAC’s goal was a 10X reliability improvement within five years. Chet wasn’t sure if five years was long enough because success in reliability depends on changing hearts and minds. One person at a time, key individuals have to understand a new paradigm: products don’t have to fail, nor do they have to be more costly. Five years was short, but Chet couldn’t resist the challenge!
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Chet trained and coached in-house engineers to become world class experts on various topics in Quality and Reliability. In turn, these Technical Topic Experts then trained, facilitated, and partnered with development engineers to impact new product development.
He sent a chemist for extensive training in Sample Preparation and Failure Analysis and bought a Scanning Electron Microscope with an Energy Dispersive Spectrometer, which paid for itself in six months in reduced scrap. IVAC now made better products for less cost.
Chet brought in the author of the best book on Designed Experiments to give lectures to engineers. He purchased dozens of copies of DESIGN EASE and DESIGN EXPERT software. Later these were put on LAN. Problems were resolved, and products and processes were optimized.
Chet established a program of Environmental Stress Screening using temperature and vibration in manufacturing to force the failure of parts with hidden defects. The "out-of-box" failure rate for those product lines with Environmental Stress Screening dropped to less than 0.1%.
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