The use of product information along its entire lifecycle: A practical framework for continuous development

With the development of IT technologies a lot of information can be collected during the product lifecycle. These pieces of information can be useful and can drive inspiration to redesign a product in order to increase its performance and reliability. Nevertheless most of the companies trace their products only during the design and the production phases without putting any effort to collect data during the middle and the end of life (e.g. use, maintenance, service, disposal etc.). The aim of this study is to develop an analytic framework to integrate and analyze data collected along all phases of a product lifecycle; this is done to give continuous feedback to the designers in order to enhance the product performance and reliability. A common database format was set to collect data from different departments. A systematic graphical and statistical procedure to analyze data was implemented; the use of well known statistical inference methodologies as individual value plot, scatterplot, boxplot, distribution fitting, analysis of variance, regressions, control charts made up a framework able to give important feedback information to designers. All of these techniques have been integrated into a software that allows a well defined and systematic exchange of information in compliance with a product lifecycle management approach. This tool is currently used by the manufacturer and allows to find correlations between various experimental measurements, product criticalities, anomalous behavior and processes out of control. The transformation of the proposed framework in a software tool led to time saving and higher quality and standardized reports.