Return on investment for a Design for Reliability program

Abstract

Last year we presented a paper on Design for Reliability (DFR), reviewing the benefits of a good DFR program and included some of the essential building blocks of DFR along with pointing out some erroneous practices that people today are using today. We discussed a good DFR Program having the following attributes: 1.Setting Goals at the beginning of the program and then developing a plan to meet the goals. 2.Having the reliability goals being driven by the design team with the reliability team acting as mentors. 3.Providing metrics so that you have checkpoints on where you are against your goals. 4.Writing a Reliability Plan (not only a test plan) to drive your program. A good DFR Program must choose the best tools from each area of the product life cycle: identify, design, analyze, verify, validate, monitor and control. The DFR Program must then integrate the tools together effectively.effectively. Since then, we have developed a method to calculate the Return on Investment (ROI) from a Design for Reliability (DFR) program, also known as the DFR ROI. In this paper, we will discuss a method we have developed to calculate the Return on Investment (ROI) from a Design for Reliability (DFR) program, also known as the DFR ROI. There are a number of factors involved in calculating the ROI for your DFR program, including: 1) improved warranty rate (derived from your reliability maturity level) 2) current warranty rate 3) cost per repair 4) cost of new reliability program 5) savings from losing a customer 6) volume. In this paper, we will show you how to calculate each of these to derive your DFR ROI.