Reliability Engineering Techniques for Consumer Products

Consumer products have been thought of as being low priced and unreliable. We will look at some of the best approaches to use in designing and manufacturing consumer products in regard to reliability, and how these approaches can result in improved profitability without increasing cost, and some aspects of implementing these approaches. The approaches discussed here can be adapted to the special needs of small companies and startups. The intended audience here is the reliability engineer or technical manager in a small company or startup, involved in hardware product development for the consumer market. This material is aimed at those people or companies who actively care to make their products better and are willing to consider various approaches that may be within their budget. Many of the techniques involved with making consumer products more reliable are common to reliability tools used for higher end products of any quality level or cost level. Analytical tools, such as FMEA (Failure Mode Effects Analysis), or HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Testing) are very useful for improving the reliability of consumer products. In this paper, we will look at some aspects of how consumer products differ from industrial products, and what special concerns there are with product reliability; we’ll discuss Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) and how they relate to consumer products reliability. We will discuss how reliability tools and methods for consumer products differ from higher end products, what tools are practical, and how some other aspects of consumer product quality and reliability differ. The special needs of the small company or startup will be considered, showing what reliability methods are more practical.