A proactive approach for predicting recurrent defective designs

Recent emphases on management of defective designs have been directed toward the human and organizational factors. A great need thus exists for an approach that is able to address the factors for successful management. This paper presents a proactive, quantitative approach to predict defective designs occurrences by incorporating workplace and organizational factors. The approach utilizes a multinominal logistic regression technique and provides information on the predicted proportion of defective designs that may occur as a result of workplace and organizational problems. The methodology used to arrive at the approach takes into account the principles of causal mechanism of defective design and the influencing factors. One hundred defect cases were employed to develop the approach. Throughout the paper, feasibility of the approach is demonstrated.