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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