Using
Reliability Information Throughout the Organization
The information
generated via a reliability engineering program or from other life data
analysis activities has a usefulness that extends beyond the group that
generated it. It should seem obvious that information regarding the
failure behavior of a product would be useful to many groups in an
organization besides just reliability engineers. However, it is a sad but
true fact that some organizations use the reliability information on their
products for little more than a specification check. In this article, we
will take a look at how life data can be used in other parts of a
manufacturing or business organization.
One of the
purposes of
the Reliability HotWire is to briefly discuss some of the basic
building blocks of a solid reliability engineering program. These steps
are all very helpful in constructing a program that will efficiently
gather information, transmit, store, analyze and report on product reliability. The process will not be the same for
everyone, of course; the construction or enhancement of a reliability
program will by necessity be specially adapted according to the specific
needs and structure of the organization. As is the case with many other
situations, "form follows function," and the form of the
reliability program will follow the function of the organization that is
implementing it.
However, it is
necessary to make sure that the information that is generated by the
reliability program is fed back throughout the organization so that the
maximum benefits of the program can be achieved. Instituting a reliability
program merely for the sake of having a reliability program will
ultimately be of no benefit to anyone. If the reliability program is not
feeding back useful information to all of the areas of the organization
that need it, it will eventually atrophy and become just a
little-utilized enclave of the larger organization. It is important to make sure that the
reliability program's benefits reach all the areas that it can.
There are obvious benefits of having a good reliability program in place.
Examples include feeding information back to manufacturing organizations
to aid in maximizing the efficiency of the manufacturing process and
performing system-level reliability analyses that can benefit the early
stages of a development program. There are still other methods of putting
reliability information to use in order to aid the organization beyond the
obvious uses. We will take a brief look at some of these now.
Connecting
Field and Lab Data
One of the most important activities that can be undertaken once a
comprehensive reliability program is in place is to be able to model the
transition between reliability data generated as a result of in-house
testing and reliability data resulting from the performance of products in
the field. We have discussed one way of "bridging the gap" between
lab and field data in a previous
article of the Reliability HotWire. The ability to bridge the
difference between these two information sources lies within the grasp of
an organization that has a good reliability program and an adequate amount
of data. Although it requires a good deal of data manipulation and
mathematical analysis, a model can be developed that will allow for the
mapping of in-house reliability data to make accurate predictions of field
performance. Obviously, this is a powerful tool that would have an
important role in projecting warranty costs for new products and the
planning of future programs.
Reliability Growth
Another use of the information that a reliability program provides is the
implementation of a reliability growth study. There are numerous
reliability growth models that can be used with a variety of types of
input data. The diversity of reliability growth models and acceptable
input makes this type of modeling very flexible, and it can be applied
across a number of different functional areas in an organization. For
example, the detailed parametric data generated during the development
phase of a product can be used with a growth model in order to judge
whether the project will meet its reliability goal within the allotted
time. Based on the growth model results, more efficient allocation of
resources on the project could be implemented based on the expected
performance of the product. Similarly, a less-complicated growth model
that accepts non-parametric data could be used to assess the change of
field reliability as a result of design or manufacturing process changes
once the product has been released. On a larger scale, the reliability
growth of specific product lines can be modeled over the course of several
generations of products in order to estimate the reliability and
associated warranty costs of future product lines or projects that have
yet to be implemented.
Optimum
Design Level Determination
With a good grasp of the reliability of components and systems, it is
possible to devise specifications and designs that result in the optimum
level of reliability performance. Designing a product with inexpensive and
unreliable parts will result in a product with low initial costs, but high
support and warranty costs. On the other hand, over-designing a product
with costly, highly reliable parts will result in a final product with low
support and warranty costs, but that may be prohibitively expensive.
Application of information from a reliability engineering program can
result in a design that balances out both of these factors, resulting in a
design reliability that minimizes the overall cost of the product. The
following figure gives a graphical representation of this concept.
Marketing
and Advertising
In the competitive marketplace, any edge in helping to
find or increase the number of paying customers can result in sizable
financial benefits. Given two competing products that are equal in all
other respects, the edge belongs to the product that is more reliable. As products become more sophisticated, so do the customers, to the point
where the reliability of a product is one of the main considerations a
savvy customer takes into account before making a purchase. As a result,
more and more advertising includes a reliability slant as part of the
sales pitch. From computers to sewing machines, the reliability of the
product is increasingly being used to market and sell a variety of
products. Some advertisements are now including what were once considered
"esoteric" reliability concepts such as MTTF (Mean Time To
Failure) values. With a solid reliability program in place, the
information can be used to help sell the product as well as to develop it.
This is particularly true when data from a competitive assessment
program can be used by sales and marketing groups to demonstrate that the
organization's product is not only highly reliable but also much more reliable than
the products of the competition.
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