Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a flow of complex engineering tasks starting from the definition of the product/asset requirements, and up to the point where the asset is operating and the Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) begins.
The development process of advanced products or systems is complex, including many processes in parallel including: concept, detailed design, integration, management of subcontractors, Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety (RAMS) requirements and analyses, design reviews, and testing.
Traditional RAMS analyses take place after most of the design is complete because the input for the analyses (BOM, failure rates, failure modes, MTTR) is not available before. BQR provides a wide range of tools and professional services that help implement RAMS considerations as early as possible in the design, including:
• Reliability allocation for rough analysis during the concept stage
• Component stress analysis and derating, schematic review, design analysis and design error detection for electronic circuits
• Plugins for ECADs (Altium, OrCad and Mentor) for fast BOM import and RAMS analyses
List of RAMS tools BQR offers for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) from preliminary concept to final design:
| Topic | Meaning |
| Reliability Allocation CARE-RBD allocation |
Allocate component failure rates in order to meet the system level reliability requirements. |
| Failure Modes And Effects Analysis (FMEA) CARE-FMEA |
Review the chains of effects from component failure mode, up to the system level. Identify and mitigate single points of failure. |
| Schematic Review for electronic circuits fiXtress-ASR |
Logical analysis of an electronic circuit design in order to identify design errors. |
| Electrical Stress analysis and Derating fiXtress-Stress AnalysisfiXtress-Derating |
Calculates the operational point of every electronic component (power, voltage, current and temperature) according to its functionality in the circuit by simulation, and compare it with a pre-defined derating criteria (according to field operation environment). This helps to identify over stress, voltage mismatch and other design errors. |
|
Reliability Analysis |
Calculate the Reliability and Availability of complex systems, accounting for redundancies, fault tolerance, repair policies and logistics. |
| Failure Modes, Effects, and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) CARE-FMECA |
Similar to FMEA, using component failure rates in order to achieve higher analysis precision. FMECA is a bottom to top analysis. |
| Testability Analysis CARE-Testability |
Analysis of optimal BIT (Built In Test) and ATE (Automatic Test Equipment) capabilities to detect and isolate failures. |
|
Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) |
While FMECA analyzes the possible effects of single failure modes bottom to top, FTA analyzes combinations of events that can lead to safety events in a top-down approach. |
| Maintainability Analysis apmOptimizer |
Estimate Mean Time To Repair (MTTR), spare parts and logistics, maintenance tasks, preventive maintenance and inspection plans. |
| Maintenance & Logistics planning and optimization apmOptimizer |
Optimize the maintenance and logistics plan in order to minimize cost while maintaining a high asset availability. |
| Life Cycle Cost (LCC) apmOptimizer |
Calculate the expected cost of maintenance and operation for the product / asset / fleet life. This allows to compare different maintenance policies and IIoT solutions, and conduct business and data driven decision making. |
| Field Data Analysis (FRACAS) BQR-Digital |
When the asset is in service, failures and maintenance data is collected. Analysis of the field data provides real failure distributions, repair times, and P-F times (time from potential failure to actual failure). The resulting data can be used to further optimize the maintenance and logistics. |