R&M and risk-analysis tools in product design, to reduce life-cycle cost and improve attractiveness

While designing a product, one has the choice of either to design out maintenance or from a maintenance point of view to design for maintenance. Often when using the "design out maintenance" approach, which is greatly influenced by reliability characteristics, the costs turn out to be either very high, or it is impossible due to technological limitations of the product and related issues. Products therefore need to be designed for easy and cost effective maintenance. While adopting the "design for maintenance" approach one again has to consider reliability characteristics in conjunction with maintainability issues to balance the costs and benefits. Thus, the need to evaluate reliability and maintainability (R&M) issues in the design phase of a product is becoming critical for market competitiveness. In this paper, the application of reliability, maintainability and risk analysis tools and methods to minimize life cycle cost of the system and to improve product attractiveness, is discussed. The incorporation of R&M issues in the design phase is examined and analyzed. The necessity of engineering training for integration of R&M considerations in the design phase, and for approaches for making provisions to incorporate new information technologies to facilitate easy learning and understanding is discussed. The paper also addresses the use of information technology for making R&M information, tools, and methods readily available to the designer at the working desk in order to ease the task of making R&M decisions.