A customer-focused reliability approach

This paper demonstrates that reliability problems can be caused not only by mismatch between product performance and technical specifications (hard failures) but also by mismatch between customer requirements and technical specifications (soft failures). Classical technical reliability (TR) definition does not take the soft failures into consideration. This observation motivates a customer-focused reliability (CR) approach in this paper. In addition, a quantitative model based on software reliability engineering (SRE) is proposed to analyze CR further. By using reliability-related customer profile and reliability-related customer use profile information, this model can be used to quantitatively analyzes how often certain CR problems are caused by different types of customers and different ways of customer use for highly innovative consumer electronics products. This approach can be used to analyze root causes related to customer and customer use of field reliability problems. It can also give feedback to the current product development strategy and test coverage and predict future CR. The CR approach is demonstrated with an example: a car audio system consisting of a CD player, a tape deck and a radio.