Title: Reliability growth vs. HASS cost for product manufacturing with fast-to-market requirement

Authors: Balaji Janamanchi, Tongdan Jin

Addresses: Division of International Business and Technology Studies, A.R. Sanchez Jr. School of Business, Texas A&M International University, 5201, University Blvd., Laredo, TX 78041, USA. ' Ingram School of Engineering, Texas State University – San Marco, 601 University Drive, RFM 5202, San Marcos, 78666 TX, USA

Abstract: This paper proposes a financial model to analyse the trade-off between the monetary benefits of reliability improvement and the costs associated with the implementation of highly accelerated stress screening (HASS) in the context of manufacturing the automatic test equipment (ATE). HASS is a reliability screening process that has been widely used as an effective tool to eliminate infant mortality and thereby improve the product mean-time-between-failures (MTBF). Furthermore, the feedback from HASS will help build quality into product and process design and thereby result in a more robust product design and production process leading to further improved MTBF. The cost-saving from improved MTBF thus obtained, is then continuously compared with the total cost of HASS implementation. The manufacturer achieves the breakeven (or better returns) as long as the HASS cost is equal to (or less than) the cost savings from the HASSed products relative to the non-HASSed products.

Keywords: reliability growth; highly-accelerated stress screen; non-homogenous Poisson process; financial modelling; HASS costs; decision support; automatic test equipment; ATE manufacturing; product design; process design; mean-time-between-failures; product MTBF; cost savings.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPQM.2010.030740

International Journal of Productivity and Quality Management, 2010 Vol.5 No.2, pp.152 - 170

Published online: 01 Jan 2010 *

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