Product Maturity, Volume 2

5Reliability Management

5.1. Context

In order to produce a mature product, equipment manufacturers try their best to reach a reliability level that is higher than the one specified, and most of all, that is constant throughout its operation duration. Three situations can be encountered:

• – the ideal case is when the product is mature;
• – the case when reliability increases is often encountered in the industry. This type of phenomenon is clearly preferable, since improving reliability involves very significant costs. This phenomenon is very often due to design flaws, which, by their nature, affect the whole range of operational products, and have a strong impact on reliability, youth failures, etc.;
• – reliability degradation is observed over time. This is generally due to the premature aging of components.

It is therefore essential to make all of the efforts necessary to avoid youth and aging failures. Youth failures can only be filtered out by specific (burn-in, run-in) tests conducted before delivery to the equipment manufacturer. As for aging failures, specific analyses or last resort tests can be proposed.

For a maximum reduction of the probability of these two dreaded scenarios, the following methodology is proposed, as illustrated in Figure 5.1. Each of the stages proposed in Figure 5.1 is defined in the following sections.

Figure 5.1. Overview diagram of product reliability ...