High pressure by top-down
Statement 6
Our top-down management put high pressure on reliability improvements, year after year.
65% of the participants have this experience! Nothing wrong with it because it keeps you alert. However if the motivation is related to ongoing customer complaints for many years, then it is prime time to investigate if this is a:
- quality problem,
- reliability problem,
- unreliability problem,
- combination
If it is structural, year after year, then unreliability is highly probable. See also Reliability vs unreliability. The possibility of having a inadequate development department is a different story. The same for quality problems. They are relatively easy to solve. There are many books, procedures etc. just about anything in this area. In there unreliability aspects have little attention.
It is generally known that quality as well as reliability is a top-down driven activity. Total management must support it. Usually it is done for quality aspects since data become available rapidly. It is a short cycle between discovery and solution of problems.
Reliability is different because the cycle is much longer. It is a also a long term issue. And because of that related to high costs, especially within warranty as agreed by 57% of the participant. See <ST01 High Warranty Costs>. It is difficult to feel unreliability. It requires specialists to see it in time. Often there are a lot of signals present (<ST04 failures in production> and <ST05 faulty batches>) , but these signal do not get the right attention at all times. "It is a factory problem, so quality". They say. A dangerous and wrong thought.
In case of unreliability, top-down have to look for oneself for the cause. (<What is the problem?>). It does not help though if you do not know how to tackle it. The principle is easy. Make it a kernel job equal to Time to Market and Cost price, not only in theory but certainly in practice. Too many top-downers have no idea what reliability means. It is considered to be a primary task for bottom-up, which is true. On the other hand, bottom-up determines the reliability while top-down determines how reliable it will be.
It is not a matter of not willing by the top-down, but just an ordinary communication gap between bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up talks about failure rates, MTBF etc. while top-down talks about money. As a matter of speaking one talks russian and the other one chinese . This gap can be closed by the right bridge by translating all technical reliability matters into money. An example.
This version with a failure rate of 100ppm have an estimated costs of € 2 million during warranty. The other version has a lower failure rate, is 10% more expensive, but their warranty costs are estimated to be only €0.5 million. Now everyone knows. A simple calculation can indicate if 10% more initial costs is worthwhile to spend in order to save € 1.5 million on warranty. Warranty costs are always more than the costs of the product because of traveling, labor, logistics. It can also be an option to change the design in such a way that service can be done cheaper. Labor is often very expensive.
In both cases top-down has some reluctance to accept warranty costs at all but they are inevitable, unless by giving no warranty at all times. There is a direct relation between warranty costs and the reliability of the product. Making all reliability aspect visible by expressing it into money makes life for top-down easier to take the right decisions. Another example:
An ordinary halogen bulb of €6 caused millions on service costs! Why? Just because the customer could not replace it by themselves so an expensive service action was required. With a service contract the supplier pays the damage and is not pleased with it. Without a service contract the customer pays who has difficulty to understand why a €6 bulb replacement costs €800. And is also not happy. Bulbs do have a limited life. Development must take care of it. On this product no FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) was done. This procedure was considered to be too expensive by top-down!. After a redesign the customer was able to do the exchange by themselves, lowering the costs for both parties. However it caused another problem but that is a different story.
It is a necessity that top-down has basic knowledge on reliability focused on money. Bottom-up has the task to translate reliability issues into money.
<ST 07 Returns with unexpected failure modes>