IEEE Reliability Society Newsletter    Vol. 62, No. 4, November, 2016

On November 25th, at Politecnico di Milano (ITALY) an invited IEEE Distinguished Lecturer Program event has been held. Prof. Michael Pecht (Director and Chair Professor, Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA) has given a lecture on the topic “Advances in product qualification and supply chain responsibilities”. The successful event gathered more than 50 international researchers and professionals (engineers, maintenance professionals, facility managers and operators) as well as university students with an interest in Reliability, Availability and Maintainability (RAM) in various applications (transportation by air, land and sea, manufacturing, power production, …). The event was organized by the IEEE Reliability Society, Italy Chapter and supported by Politecnico di Milano. The talk addressed the nowadays rapid products change, customer’s numerous choices and tremendous price pressure on suppliers, that are pressured to test quickly their products. However, the traditional test and qualification standards were claimed not to be working. Over the past 10 years, there have been an increasingly large number of products that have passed qualification tests but have failed in the field. The resulting costs of these failures have been in the hundreds of millions of dollars for many companies. This lecture has overviewed why the current methods are inadequate, why the standards need to be replaced and how companies can qualify products in an accelerated manner to ensure acceptable reliability. Virtual qualification, accelerated testing, target application requirements, failure mechanisms and models, and prognostics-based qualification were discussed, with various examples. Responsibilities with the supply chain were also be presented.