Design for reliability - a Reliability Engineering Framework

More and more, reliability is seen as a key differentiator in an extremely competitive globalized market. Recent examples from the automotive sector illustrate very well how serious the impact from field problems can be, more in particular when safety risks are possibly involved: liability claims, recall actions, negative effect on the market share of a brand and so on. But how to match the growing pressure to shorten the product development cycle with reliability targets as no early failures in the field during the warranty period, a low intrinsic failure rate during the useful life of e.g. 10 years and wear out only beyond the useful life of the product? To deal with this, a Reliability Engineering Framework is described consisting of 3 layers: a process layer, a tools layer and a managerial layer. This framework allows mitigating potential reliability risks at early phases of the product development so that the development time can be decreased considerably.