The Design Review Tree™ (DRT): Double-check Your Product Design
The Design Review Tree™, DRT for short, is our original tool to help you review your product designs and partially your project. While every case is specific, it helps to point out many of these little things that can be easily forgotten or seems obvious after all, but can lead to catastrophic project, quality or safety issues. It is a more structured and complementary approach than our design review checklist article. The Design Review Tree is not intended to replace your in-house company quality procedures, if any, but be complementary and provide this “external view” often missing in design failures.
Example: the risks of gluing external parts of vehicles, if to be done at all, was already encountered in the car industry 15 years ago.
A systematic evaluation of a design before it is finalized is also a foundational practice within Design for Six Sigma (DfSS). This lean methodology is a proactive approach to identify and address potential design flaws early, which helps to minimize defects and variations in the final product.
The design review process is also integral to Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA): the primary purpose of a design review is to identify and mitigate potential failures or issues early in the product development process. This systematic evaluation allows for the identification of potential failure modes and their effects, which is a core component of PFA.
The DRT in 4 easy steps
- Click “EXPAND ALL”. You start the analyse with all nodes having the “Unknown” status
- Set each downstream node (leafs) according to one of the 4 status than can be set with a right clic on it:
- All upstream nodes automatically inherit the worst case of all its descendants node, following this priority rule: Not Validated > Unknown > Validated > Not applicable
- Your product is validated … when the root node is green
DRT Tips
- do not quit this page before you’ve finished, or your selections will be lost.
- clic on any node to expand or retract its downstream nodes.
- hover on any node to see its full description, examples and tips.
- a screen size of 27″ is recommended.
- when you click on a particular node, the related posts and standards are updated above the DRT. These links open in a separate window to preserve your work here.
- take a snapshot when you’re done to save it as a .png image (use the “SAVE IMAGE” button). It can be part of your validation files.
Design Review Tree™
This original tool is extremely server-ressource intensive and being scrapped by bots continuously. Access is therefore reserved now to members only.
> Login < or > Register < to access it 100% free.
Revision Policy
Current: v01.00.12
Changes will be tracked in this section.
Last 2 digits track cosmetic changes, typos corrections or changes in the links. These two digits will evolve so as corrections but will not be detailed here and do not impact any previous review.
Any change to the other digits indicates an improvement or addition in the Design Review Tree and should be evaluated versus your own design particular case.
Note on privacy: your choices of status and colors are applied and calculated within your browser, and are not communicated to our web server.
> You are welcome to provide your feedback or suggest some risks you would like to have included in the DRT <