In this installment of the series dealing with the myriad participants within an organization, we’ll start with failure analysis specialists, before moving to marketing and sales, and finally getting to the finance team. We’re moving away from the positions where the focus on reliability is central, but there are important considerations in relation to product reliability for each of these roles still. The next post in this series will be the final one.
The role of a failure analysis specialist
Many organizations do little more than isolating the faulty components and return them to the supplier for analysis. This process rarely results in accurate or rapid resolution of product failures resulting from design, manufacturing, or supplier issues. The role of a failure analyst is to collect failure information and determine the root cause. Some organizations have large well-staffed failure analysis (FA) labs and provide detailed root-cause analysis. Every organization should have basic diagnostic and troubleshooting equipment and staff trained in basic FA techniques.
For issues that go beyond the internal failure analysis capabilities, the role of the FA specialists is to work with outside FA labs (not the supplier lab) to determine the root cause of the product failure.
Where does marketing come in?
The primary role of the marketing and sales teams is to create demand and book sales, but they also act as both consumers and providers of reliability information. First, these teams should understand and convey accurate information about the product’s reliability performance. Second, these teams should understand and convey accurate information about customer expectations and requirements to the rest of the organization.
Get the finance team onboard
Warranty accruals and expenses often reside solely in the domain of finance. An understanding of basic reliability principles and prediction information can dramatically increase the accuracy of the accruals. In one organization the product development teams created detailed and accurate models of future field failures and sent the finance team Weibull cumulative distribution plots covering the expected product lifetime. Because the finance team did not know how to read these plots, they arbitrarily selected the midpoint from each graph for use in warranty accrual estimates. With just a little training and understanding the accrual accuracy increased 100 fold, thereby saving the organization from major swings in warranty expense accounting.
Because the finance team did not know how to read these plots, they arbitrarily selected the midpoint from each graph for use in warranty accrual estimates. With just a little training and understanding the accrual accuracy increased 100 fold, thereby saving the organization from major swings in warranty expense accounting.
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