Sale reliability of products

There are four notions of reliability in the literature. They are design reliability, inherent reliability, sale reliability and field reliability. This paper develops a model to link the sale reliability to the inherent reliability. Transportation and storage affects the product reliability in a way that the product is equivalently subjected to a step-stress test with the failure being non-self-announced. An equivalent use time (EUT) is introduced to represent the effect of transportation and storage on the reliability. A statistical approach is developed to relate EUT to the parameters of transportation and storage. The engineering and managerial implications of the sale reliability model are discussed.