Reliability goes beyond quality. Reliability is quality over time.
A quality product meets customers' needs at the time of shipment.
A reliable, trouble-free product continues to satisfy customers for a long time.

Q. Why do you need to focus special attention on improving reliability?

Today's customers, both industrial and consumer, have become much more demanding about product reliability than they were a few years ago. Why? Because they know that they can get it!

Q. What are the costs related to poor product reliability?

Reliability-related costs are all those costs resulting from product field failures or perceived failures from the time of shipment over the life of the product. They include warranty costs and the opportunity cost of lost customers.

Q. What must you do to have reliable products?

We have included a white paper giving the major elements required. This Roadmap to Product Reliability Improvement is briefly summarized as:
1. The culture at your company must give reliability its proper importance. This may require painful compromises in some areas.
2. Communication channels with your customers must be open and formalized to capture their detailed comments related to product failures.
3. A well-conceived failure database of product field failure modes supported by failure analysis to root cause is fundamental to corrective action and improvement.
4. Reliability must be designed into products. The product development design engineering team should take the primary responsibility for your company's product reliability. Formal product development processes and good project management practices are required.
5. Your procurement group must drive supplier quality and reliability through partnering.
6. Manufacturing has to use modern quality control methods to ensure that components and products are produced to specification with negligible variation.

Q. How do you Kick Start process improvement?