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Companies face the critical reliability problem of products due to the development of outsourcing. This study intends to provide some feasible solutions for a company to improve the reliability level of products.

The paper considers the reward and reliability decisions regarding a product made with two complementary components from two different suppliers: high-capable and low-capable. Two kinds of reliability improvement incentives (normal incentive and cost-sharing incentive) through which a manufacturer provides a reward and shares the reliability improvement cost with a supplier are discussed. As the Stackelberg leader, the manufacturer determines the strategy, while the suppliers are responsible for determining its reliability. Using a game-theoretic framework, four different contract scenarios are addressed. We develop analytical methods to better understand how the manufacturer decides the incentive mechanism to be used for the suppliers.

The results show that cost-sharing contracts do not always lead to a higher reliability level and more enormous profits. Setting a target reliability level is better for the manufacturer. The cost-sharing contract is beneficial for a high-capable supplier even though it does not directly participate in that kind of mechanism. A low-capable supplier gains more profit when the manufacturer provides incentive mechanisms that do not specify a target reliability level.

This paper investigates the reliability improvement mechanism used for complementary products and focuses on identifying the optimal decisions when demand is influenced by the gap between the product's failure rate and the standard failure rate.

Provides a comprehensive and evaluative account of product reliability across a number of different dimensions. Through utilizing secondary sources of data and supported by some preliminary qualitative research findings, attempts to decompose those elements which have a direct relevance to product reliability improvement. To this end, provides a conceptual framework which can be integrated within the whole business interaction entities to enable reliability to be adequately considered throughout the life cycle phases.

This paper seeks to introduce a set of key practices that can be used to assess whether an organization has the ability to design, develop and manufacture reliable electronic products.

The ability to design, develop and manufacture reliable electronic products is defined in the paper in terms of a reliability capability maturity model, which is a measure of the practices within an organization that contribute to the reliability of the final product, and the effectiveness of these practices in meeting the reliability requirements of customers.

The paper presents a procedure for evaluating and benchmarking reliability capability. Criteria for assigning different capability maturity levels are presented. The paper also presents a case study corresponding to reliability capability benchmarking of an electronics company.

The paper provides a set of practices for evaluating and benchmarking reliability capability.

States that the time taken to deliver a product to the market determines a company’s success, and that research has shown that a delay of six months leads to 33 per cent of its potential profit being lost. Explores the existing method of assessing new product reliability, namely reliability demonstrating testing, and presents its numerous shortcomings and deficiencies. Analyses the results of performing reliability demonstration testing on eight products which support the viewpoint that it is no longer appropriate. Proposes a SURGE (stress unveiled reliability growth enhancement) process, leading to significant saving in development time and thereby time‐to‐market while providing a more reliable product and process. Places emphasis on the control of all of the development processes, design, manufacturing, and materials procurement and producing prototype units via the intended volume process. Performs monitoring by appropriate stress testing designed to precipitate all potential defects and involves testing beyond design specification. By correcting defects on the product, and ultimately on the processes which produced them, develops more reliable products. Concludes that the results of the SURGE process have led to a reduction in development times of 14 per cent while also reducing the time taken to ramp up to full volume production by 50 per cent.

Argues that in the coming years the present methods of demonstrating reliability will no longer be feasible and alternative methods must be found. Deals with building‐in reliability (BIR) and the necessity to change from the standard end‐of‐line‐measurement technique of life test to a more proactive in‐line approach, where reliability can be measured by process parameters and reaction time is immediate, resulting in a continuous flow of reliable product to the end user. This approach will not eliminate the use of end‐of‐line monitoring, but will reduce the amount which needs to be carried out. Suggests that it will only be done to demonstrate that processes are operating to certain maximum failure rates, where the online controls will in fact guarantee that the reliability is much greater than that being demonstrated. Examines the customers’ attitude towards reliability, and points out that sharing of data will be essential if the BIR approach is to be successful. Outllines two examples which demonstrate the effectiveness of a BIR program and explains how, if implemented, it can be used to prevent the manufacture of potentially unreliable product.

Reliability of a product is highly dependent on the process capability index of the manufacturing process. Discusses a mathematical modelling technique for deriving the relationship between the product reliability strength and the process capability requirement to meet the product reliability strength for different types of external stress/load distributions which the product undergoes in the actual working environment. Considers four cases of external stress distributions: normal, log‐normal, expotential and Weibull. These techniques can be applied effectively in industrial production plants while selecting machines with required process capability to meet the product reliability strength demand.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute a model that would facilitate the infusing of quality and reliability in new products by blending Six Sigma concept and new product development (NPD) process.

A model called QUARNEWSS (stands for QUA – quality, R – reliability, NEW – new product and SS – Six Sigma) was designed. QUARNEWSS blends four stages of NPD process with Six Sigma's DMAIC improvement methodology and belt-based training infrastructure. After designing, QUARNEWSS was adopted to infuse quality and reliability in a new product being developed at a compressed air treatment products manufacturing company.

The implementation experience indicated that QUARNEWSS could act as a vehicle for systematically infusing quality and reliability in new products.

The contribution of QUARNEWSS model through this paper is valuable on considering the fact that modern customers demand new products with high degree of quality and reliability.

The quality performance of a firm is often assessed by the reliability of the firm’s equipment or machinery. Yet, reliability has not received the same attention as quality. Several organizations today function effectively because the machinery which provides the “system of operation” is highly dependable and reliable. In this paper, we develop a framework that establishes the link between quality, reliability, and maintainability. The aim of this framework is to get corporate attention to focus on reliability issues and also, to establish the link between reliability, company’s bottom line, and corporate survival. A greater focus on “total reliability management (TRM)” will help firms to improve their productivity and efficiency while reducing cost and increasing their competitiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a structured methodology for performing build‐in reliability (BIR) investigation during a new product development cycle.

The methodology in this paper represents an extension of the Quality Functional Deployment/House of Quality (QFD/HoQ) concepts to reliability studies. It is able to translate the reliability requisites of customers into functional requirements for the product in a structured manner based on a Failure Mode And Effect Analysis (FMEA). Besides, it then allows it to build a completely new operative tool, named House of Reliability (HoR), that enhances standard analyses, introducing the most significant correlations among failure modes. Using the results from HoR, a cost‐worth analysis can be easily performed, making it possible to analyse and to evaluate the economical consequences of a failure.

The paper finds that the application of the proposed approach allows users to identify and control the design requisites affecting reliability. The methodology enhances the reliability analysis introducing and managing the correlations among failure modes, splitting the severity into a detailed series of basic severity aspects, performing also cost/worth assessments.

It is shown that the methodology enables users to finely analyse failure modes by splitting severity according to the product typology and the importance of each Severity criterion according to laws or international standards. Moreover the methodology is able to consider the “domino effects” and so to estimate the impact of the correlation between the causes of failure. Finally a cost/worth analysis evaluates the economical consequences of a failure with respect to the incurred costs to improve the final reliability level of the product.

The paper proposes a completely new approach, robust, structured and useful in practice, for reliability analysis. The methodology, within an integrated approach, overcomes some of the largely known limits of standard FMECA: it takes into account multiple criteria, differently weighted, it analyses the product considering not only the direct consequence of a failure, but also the reaction chain originated by a starting failure.

In today's electronic package development cycle, activities are managed by multiple participants in the supply chain, which might have different quality and reliability impacts to the end product. As a result, the reliability risk is much higher for companies who do not have insight into and/or control over the products received. The purpose of this paper is to show how design‐for‐reliability (DFR) approaches will come into play to manage the risk.

In this paper, DFR approaches for package development will be discussed from the perspective of the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). DFR practices through the package development cycle will be described based on key development modules. A case study for flip chip ball gris array package development using an advanced Cu/Low‐k silicon technology will be presented. Key measures to help control the quality and improve the reliability will be presented.

The proposed methodology significantly improves component and package reliability through the engagement in design, manufacturing, assessment and system evaluation.

The paper discusses the research results and the proposed DFR methodology will be helpful for fabless design houses, electronics manufacturing service (EMS) partners in the supply chain, and OEMs to manage the reliability of the products.