Managing risk by extracting management information and design feedback from field failures

With the short product development time and high reliability of modern products, precise estimates of the reliability of a product can often only be based on field data. But uncertainties and noise in data cause most companies to make limited use of such data. Accumulated failure curves M(t) based on superimposed renewal processes have been known for 20 years but are not widely used. This simple and efficient method give valuable information for top management as well as for design feed back. Examples from the last 17 years of practical use of the method illustrates how very valuable information can easily be extracted from field data. Examples cover large systems (sale volume 4 systems) as well as consumer products with sale volumes of millions