Understanding Failure Severity in New Product Development Processes of Consumer Electronics Products

Reliability feedback information from the field is essential for product improvement. Traditionally, consumer electronics service centers have provided the product designers with reliability information about product generations on the market at that time. However, within the field of high volume consumer electronics, movement of the business processes to emerging markets, increasing time-to-market pressure, increasing product complexity and increasing customer requirements have led to an increasing number of nontechnical failures. Moreover, these business trends have resulted in higher requirements on the information that is needed in the development process. Particularly, information about the root causes of non-technical failures is required to determine the impact of these failures on the overall product reliability. This study investigates the suitability of current service processes for the collection of information about nontechnical failures and their root causes in order to prioritize them within the development process of consumer electronics. Three case studies, performed at service centers for consumer electronics products, indicate that the recent trends in the field of consumer electronics have resulted in an information gap between developers and users of these products. In order to close this gap, the authors suggest the development of a new failure prioritization model for consumer electronics products