Companies often continue to use traditional Reliability management approaches without thinking out the box and face major challenges handling new product failures while trying to maintain low cost of failure support.
Without measurements and predictions within their management systems, they run a VERY HIGH RISK of losing a significant amount of money on low reliability products.
The consumer industry is riddled with such cases, though often are not well known by the consumers unless it is a major brand product with high market profile, as in recent case of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smart phone.
Other lesser known cases, but equally serious for the manufacturers in terms of profit loss include:
- May 2011 – Announcement all Thomson make Skyboxes being replaced. Power supply e-cap issue.
- Mar 2012 – Samsung LCD TV power supply e-cap problem. Famously quoted as the ‘click of death’. Each affected TV owner given $300 credit.
- May 2015 – Samsung LCD TV recall in Australia.
- July 2011 – USA class action against LG due to power board degradation / failures with plasma and LCD TVs.
- Nov 2014 – Panasonic laptop battery recall. 300,000 laptops affected.
- Aug 2016 – Intel Fitness Watch field recall.
More often than not, the major field issues arise from poor level, or in some cases, lack of an effective Early Life / Warranty Reliability Test Programme which has built into it the correct level of functionality test and stress to stimulate a wide range of latent defects if they exist in the design or after early manufacture.
It is not rocket science to design effective stress test programmes, but if old methods are used and little work done on experimentation of new defect stimulation stress techniques, the same old problems will continue and high field failure costs will result.
Reliability Solutions has the benefit of working with so many different electronic and electro mechanical clients and developing new experimental techniques that are first proven to work then integrated into the clients new stress test approach and Quality management system.
Using this experience your company can benefit from this deep knowledge on how to prevent the major issues that can lead to catastrophic failures and subsequent major revenue loss.
Ask yourself the simple questions below;
Do you spend too much money on product Inspection to try to find defects before shipment?
Are your customers complaining about the number of your products, which Fail under Warranty?
Are you confident in your employee ability to Control and Measure Reliability?
Is your Cost of Quality affecting your overall Profit Margin?
Do you lack confidence in the Design Quality of your New Product?
Do you struggle to achieve high confidence at New Product Introduction Stage?