Overview Yaskawa R&D activities concentrate on three levels including pure, technology-based and customer-focused. Pure R&D- consists of motor propulsion, human automation, and other fields Technology-based R&D- occurs when the development and creation of new core technologies take center stage Customer-focused R&D- allows Yaskawa’s customers the ability to easily make use of the best technology and earn faster returns on their investments. R&D has support facilities located in Japan, United States, Israel, and India which are all part of an organization dedicated to: licensing agreements joint ventures cooperative business arrangements and other instruments that make available a broad range of information and technology to augment the original wor This system supports the company’s quality, growth, and customer satisfaction goals, which in turn enables Yaskawa to introduce a steady stream of leading-edge products. Strengths Yaskawa’s core strength is taking innovation and invention and successfully implementing these technologies into the highest-quality products, in efforts of providing customers with new and better solutions. The first important step is concerned with New Product design, as Yaskawa begins by listening to the customer. They accomplish this by thoroughly understanding: the applications the operating environment the performance requirements ease of use and other customer expectations Yaskawa’s obsession with Quality and Reliability is what drives our design, as it’s planned and specified just as carefully as the rest of the product. That’s what they mean when they say that Quality and Reliability are “designed in.”  High reliability design targets are set based on decades of experience, benchmarking, customer input, and industry research. Yaskawa thoroughly tests the reliability of new technologies, the consistency of new materials, and the failure rate of every component within new products to be certain that the new design will achieve the reliability objectives we demand. By consciously designing new products based on the learning curve of past designs, Yaskawa has diminished the failures at introduction of the latest 7-series drives to 1/15 that of the 3 series and the newer 1000 series is even more stringent. Development Quality Check Process Market and Customer Requirements (Product Plan) Product Plan/Review Conceptual/Detail Design Design Review Prototype Build Product Qualification Test Plan/Review & Result/Review Production Preparation and  Manufacturing Quality Plan First Article Inspection Product Release Approval Mass Production and Release Real World Testing As a final step before release, Yaskawa drives and motion-control products are installed in customer beta sites to perform application testing under actual conditions.  Information learned during this process is incorporated into final-product design, before manufacturing begins. How Yaskawa Calculates MTBF The MTBF calculation starts with determining the Failure rate (FIT) for a random failure period where the failure rate is stable. Yaskawa’s overall FIT is based on the failure reports received from the field for a monthly period of time, (including Warranty and Non-Warranty items) and is as follows: FIT = Qty of Failures/[(30 days x 24 hours per day) x (total qty of units shipped)] x 10 to the 9th power. Our calculations follow the Bellcore TR-332 standard. MTBF is defined for a repairable system and is calculated as the inverse number of FIT mentioned above (MTBF = 1/FIT).

"Yaskawa's quality experience begins in product design - which means we start by listening to the customer and thoroughly understanding what they need a product to be... and why..." - Nory Takada, Yaskawa's VP of Engineering & Development