Prospectus2

Background

Industry Needs

The U.S. ended the World War II conflict as a glorious victor and undisputed world leader. No other country could come even remotely close to competing with America’s economic strengths or technological prowess. In 1945, the United States alone accounted for 50% of the world’s GNP. Anyone wanting to buy an airplane, a computer (or perhaps more accurately, in those days, a Hollerith machine), a car, a television set, a new refrigerator, or even a light bulb, could only find these in the United States, or at best, in domestic brands frequently containing essential components from America. Not only in the military and economic sense, but also in terms of science and technology, the U.S. was, by far, the world leader. Due to the long period of reconstruction in other parts of the developed world, the nation was to continue to enjoy this quasi-monopoly in almost every major industry for a number of years to come.

In the early 70's, the developed countries started to gradually invade the American market by producing better quality products at lower prices than those produced in the U.S. It started with cameras, television sets, and cars. Soon after, no industry was immune to the international competition, including aircraft industries and pharmaceutics. The two major selling characteristics of these products are cost and quality. The American industries realized that in order to compete, they needed to emphasize quality during every aspect of the product life cycle. This resulted in an ever-increasing reliance on new quality initiatives.

The traditional role of quality assurance is to ensure that the design/manufacturing processes are in control by statistical means and provide surveillance of the outputs to assure conformance. The increased emphasis on "higher quality" products at lower costs, combined with global competition, is continuously magnifying the importance of quality. For example, a semiconductor company improved the reliability of its transistors and diodes through reliability and reduced assembly line rejects from 35% to less than 5% while keeping its prices more than competitive. This required new unique approaches in reliability engineering for manufacturing and assembly, as well as quality engineering to sustain consistency in the production of the product.

As customers demand ever-higher levels of quality of their products and services, engineers must keep pace by continually improving their processes. It is important to note that "good quality" is not good enough. Indeed, if the perception of a supplier’s quality is "good", only 70% are very willing to repurchase from that supplier and 30% are likely to go elsewhere. It is only when the supplier’s quality reaches "excellent" that suppliers find their customers are willing to repurchase without searching out the competition. To quote Deming, the definition of Quality is the act of "delighting the customer".

In this environment, the QRE Center fills the important role of an objective organization creating tools and methodologies to solve quality and reliability engineering problems. The Center also performs advanced research to provide innovative and practical ways to improve components, products, and systems in order for the company member to be successful and remain competitive. Thus, the QRE Center serves as a crystal ball for its affiliate companies, giving them an early chance to examine future technical developments and to adjust their production, manufacturing, and business plans to take best advantage of them.

Purpose

The mission of the Center is to conduct research and develop models and prototypes for evaluating system performance and improving quality and reliability of components, products, and systems. Our goal is to provide timely, high quality, and cost-effective research, development, training, seminars, and workshops in the quality and reliability engineering areas. The Center has a reliability testing facility that can be used to assess the quality and reliability during the life cycle of products.

The Quality and Reliability Engineering (QRE) Center is a national resource for research, technology evaluation, development of quality and reliability tools, quality and reliability testing, education, and information transfer.

The QRE Center is dedicated to the vigorous pursuit of new techniques that will lead to high quality and highly reliable components, products, and systems. In the current environment of growing public demand for higher quality products, service, and rapid technological changes, the QRE Center plays a key role in serving the mutual interests of private industry, government agencies, and academia. As part of two major universities (Rutgers and Arizona State University), the QRE Center educates a new generation of technical personnel for careers in the quality and reliability engineering field.

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