System Evaluation or Reliability in Economic Perspective

The primary interest of a system user is the annual net Benefit he obtains from the complete man-machine system. This Benefit is the annual Worth of his use of the system, minus the annual Cost of having and using the system. System and engineering design effort must be allocated according to potential Benefit development or improvement. This is so obvious that it is often dismissed as ``done intuitively.'' But for complex systems intuition can be far from adequate. Anything less than analytical design for best Benefit leaves the producer wide open to competitive design that provides far better Benefit. Management allocation of funds, whether to projects or functional groups, must be identically guided. Management support on any other basis inhibits profit, growth, and even survival. Reliability improvement effort therefore must compete with other kinds of design improvement, according to potential user Benefit. Pure ``reliability improvement'' is not much of a justification to Management. But predictable user Benefit in annual savings, resulting from reliability improvement, cannot be ignored. If such Benefit can compete with that from other investments, it will have full Management support.