We have recently completed the QPAC project. QPAC addreesed
the issue of closing the loop from troubleshooting to design. It did this by
using records of past problem as input to the process FMEA exercise. We are
still writing up the results of the project, but an early paper on it is
available on-line. Download paper
You might look on this as generalising from specific cases.
In order to encourage foundry staff to report errors as completely as
possible, we have provided a system which suggests what to do about errors
using details of how previous similar errors were solved.