BALANCING RISK TO MINIMIZE TESTING COSTS

摘要

Product quality and safety testing costs money. Costs include purchasing and maintaining test equipment (TE), rejecting good product, accepting bad product, and resolving OOT notifications from calibration laboratories. Given the trade-offs between TE accuracy and its life cycle costs and the costs of bad test decisions, what is the best way to apply limited resources? What are the risks, what uncertainties are required, and what is the optimum reliability target and calibration interval? Which is more cost effective: Higher reliability targets or more accurate equipment? What are the relative impacts on safety and quality of errors in the cal lab and the production floor? This paper applies basic risk, uncertainty, and interval analysis to help address these questions.