Failure

A much more important question for your management is, “What are the costs of failure?”  Some failures can threaten human life or a military mission.  Others are only an annoyance.  Either can jeopardize our future business and that potential cost is extremely difficult to quantify. Using a small number of units to find the potential failure mechanisms is a bargain compared to a recall or repair of field units if a flaw or weak link is discovered after thousands have been manufactured. By the time a vendor learns of field failures, it’s too late to improve the product’s design and/or manufacture.   Thus your management really needs reliability at product introduction.

You want to know in a very few days of testing, that the firm’s new product will work satisfactorily for several years.  As development lab manager, you have been forced to employ some way to identify those mechanisms that are most likely to cause failures in time. You talk to others in the electronics industry and you find out that electronics without defects is very capable of high stress levels without damage. This correlates with your experience that defect-free electronics has an inherently long life; and many times it is much longer than technologically useful life. An example is all of those personal computers over 5 years old, which of that, 90% would probably operate another 10 years. So, you explain to your management that the real knowledge of electronics hardware assemblies’ reliability that is most relevant is acquired from the discovery of the boundaries. That answers the question, what are the margins of operation and the strength of the real product and what causes those limits?