Intellectual capital: utilizing the Web for knowledge management and data utilization in reliability engineering

Intellectual capital is one of the most important assets in successful companies. An important part of this intellectual capital is the product quality and reliability intellectual capital that is comprised of "lessons learned", corrective actions taken, best practices, data regarding customer perception and customer feedback as it relates to different products, and most importantly accurate reliability metrics on deployed parts, components and systems. Managing this knowledge, experience and information should be a high priority in both large-scale and small-scale companies. This paper presents a description of the conception and implementation of three web-based systems for the management of reliability and quality information. These are: (1) a simple internal tracking system (ITS) developed to manage customer support and anomaly tracking data for a software development company; (2) the evolution of this concept into a more complex and powerful quality tracking and management system (QTMS) capable of meeting the failure reporting, corrective action and customer support needs of both large and small companies with diverse product lines and product configurations; (3) a Web-based reliability/quality dashboard for automated analysis and presentation of the reliability and quality data captured by systems like the ITS and QTMS. The three Web-based systems presented in this paper were initially developed by and used by ReliaSoft Corporation with great success and user acceptance. This success led to subsequent modifications, adaptations and deployments of similar systems at other companies.