Design for Serviceability & Maintainability

There are two fundamental ways to assure a longer operating life for products, systems and equipment: enhance reliability to minimize the need to service or maintain equipment or make it easy and inexpensive to diagnose and service the item.

We provide consulting and customized training to help organization’s achieve these objectives.  We have worked across many industries to apply the principles of design for serviceability (DFS) or design for maintainability including purely electronic system, purely mechanical systems, and electro-mechanical systems for business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and government markets.

There are several types of assistance that we can provide.

Process Improvement to Address Design for Serviceability

We can conduct a review of the current development process to identify opportunities to improve how serviceability is addressed during development.  This can result in recommendations on actions to take to better address serviceability during development such as:

  • How to better integrate service and support function or service engineering functions into the development process.
  • Development of an appropriate service strategy.
  • Defining requirements related to availability, serviceability/maintainability and reliability.
  • Process steps at appropriate points to collaborate and provide feedback to enhance reliability, diagnosability, and serviceability.
  • Recommended development process deliverables related to serviceability/maintainability.
  • Methods to analyze the reliability, diagnosability and serviceability of product designs.
  • Tools to identify issues such as failure reporting and corrective action system (FRACAS)
  • Incorporating reliability and serviceability considerations in design reviews.
  • Metrics to monitor and identify areas to improve related to serviceability/maintainability.
  • The organization and process of the service and support functions once a product is fielded.

We can then work with the organization to implement the needed process improvements to address DFS.  This can included updating the product development process (e.g., procedures and process flows), defining required participation and corresponding roles and responsibilities in product development teams, and defining systems, methods and templates to support this enhanced development approach.

Design for Serviceability/Maintainability Training

We can conduct a hands-on Design for Serviceability/Maintainability Workshop.  The workshop is customized to the nature of your products and business environment.  The workshop includes many examples to illustrate serviceability issues, exercises to assess serviceability of a product design, as well as a major exercise to analyze the serviceability of your products.  See the following for a detailed workshop description and outline.

Design for Serviceability/Maintainability Assessment

We can facilitate a product team with conducting an assessment of their product design for serviceability.  We provide a methodology for assessing the serviceability of one of more key service procedures and the underlying product design.  This methodology and supporting tools are made available for future use within your organization.  As part of the assessment we then facilitate brainstorming ways to improve the serviceability of the design, either through enhancing reliability.  We can either document the findings and recommendations coming from this assessment or guide the project team in doing so.

To learn more about our capabilities and experience, see our presentation on DRM Associates Capabilities: Design for Serviceability.

For further information, contact Kenneth Crow at DRM Associates
Email: k.crow@npd-solutions.com