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This paper depicts IAI's real-life experience in estimating and optimizing system's quality costs associated with upgrading a transport helicopters' avionic system. This pilot project was conducted at Lahav, the military aircraft division of the Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) in conjunction with the SysTest project. SysTest was a European Commission R&D project chartered with developing a systems Verification, Validation and Testing (VVT) methodology and a process model for estimating product lifecycle cost, risk, quality, time, etc. The SysTest endeavor and IAI's pilot project are described briefly. Thereafter, the paper presents a case study where the overall quality costs are estimated based on the current VVT strategy established at Lahav/IAI. Our findings showed that the actual performance of VVT process amounted to 34% of the quality costs. The appraisal risk cost (expected cost associated with the detection of defects during the VVT process) amounted to 6%. Notably, the impact risk cost (cost emanated from not performing VVT as part of the VVT strategy) amounted to 60% of the quality costs. At the same time, a significantly improved VVT strategy, reducing the cost of quality by over 25%, is readily available. Our conclusion is that the current VVT strategy at Lahav/IAI is clearly not a most efficient one. Less cost-effective VVT activities are performed at too high a performance level and visa versa. We assert that systems' VVT is performed at many organizations based on “engineering intuition” and, plainly, this is not a good yardstick. We are currently starting to apply a formal VVT optimization methodology in a large IAI program, developing a state of the art communication satellite. |
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