Early Life Failures
Abstract
Kirk and Fred discuss the impact of early life failures on the customer
Key Points
Join Kirk and Fred as they discuss how failures after a customer starts to have confidence in a product it fails, is the most costly and frustrating for the customer
Topics include:
- Out-of-the-box failures can be annoying, but you can immediately send it back for replacement before installing or starting to rely on it. Early-life failures are even more irritating and costly for customers who used it for a short time before it failed, as they may have to stop a project or disassemble a system to replace it. All this makes it the most costly for the manufacturer, in warranty costs and reputation for reliability
- If a product doesn’t work for ten minutes, forget the fact that you designed it to last 10 years; the customer doesn’t care. Who knows if they use it for 8 years and it fails or is technologically obsolete? Most will likely be satisfied for 8 years of use.
- Highly Accelerated LIFE testing (Yes, HALT) always shows useful data about and between early prototype or production units. If a latent design defect or weakness is not discovered, comparing the empirical operational limits between samples can reveal a wide distribution of strength margins due to variations in a single component.
Enjoy an episode of Speaking of Reliability. Where you can join friends as they discuss reliability topics. Join us as we discuss topics ranging from design for reliability techniques to field data analysis approaches.
Show Notes
Please click on this link to access a relatively new analysis of traditional reliability prediction methods article from the US ARMY and CALCE titled “Reliability Prediction – Continued Reliance on a Misleading Approach”. It is in the public domain, so please feel free to distribute it. Attempting to predict reliability is a misleading and costly approach to use for developing a reliable system.
Here is a link to the book “Next Generation HALT and HASS: Robust design of Electronics and Systems,” written by Kirk Gray and John Paschkewitz. It can also be found on Amazon Books at this link.
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