Title: Modelling sales lag and reliability of an automobile component from warranty database

Authors: Md. Rezaul Karim

Addresses: Department of Statistics, University of Rajshahi, Rajshahi – 6205, Bangladesh

Abstract: Automotive manufacturing companies utilise the warranty database as a very rich source of field reliability data that provides valuable information to enhance the quality and reliability of their products and for feedback to new product development systems on products performance in actual usage conditions. However, the information in the warranty database is often incomplete and thus requires special methods of analysis. This paper analyses a special type of warranty database of an automobile component where the sales amounts are unknown in the database. The sales amounts are necessary to calculate the risk and censored data sets and finally to estimate the lifetime distribution of the component. This paper presents methodology to fit the lifetime distribution and to estimate the reliability of the component based on warranty database.

Keywords: automobile industry; automotive components; failure mode; field failure data; reliability; sales lag; warranty claims; automotive warranty data.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRS.2008.021067

International Journal of Reliability and Safety, 2008 Vol.2 No.3, pp.234 - 247

Published online: 01 Nov 2008 *

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