Quality, Warranty and Preventive Maintenance

Book excerpt: Quality, Warranty and Preventive Maintenance examines the impact of product quality on warranty and maintenance costs and strategies, from the perspectives of both manufacturers and users. In addition, the theories of warranty and preventive maintenance are introduced and discussed. Common wisdom supports the notion that better product quality means lower warranty costs for the manufacturer, and lower maintenance costs for the users of a manufactured product. This proposition is examined in some detail on the basis of failure time models. The authors investigate what exactly better quality means in warranty and maintenance management, and how it impacts warranty policies and costs for the manufacturer, and replacement and maintenance strategies and costs for the users. In measuring quality improvement, the main concepts and tools used are those of stochastic ordering and mixture models. The theoretical base of the work is a time-varying failure-rectification process. This process includes, as special cases, replacement, minimal repair, and imperfect repair, as alternative rectification modes that may be available to the manufacturer or the user in warranty-servicing or maintaining a product. In addition to serving as a unifying base for the entire monograph, the use of this process enables one to investigate jointly optimal repair-effort/warranty-policy and repair-effort/maintenance-strategy configurations for repairable units. This book should be of interest to researchers in industry and academia, and to quality, warranty and maintenance professionals, specialists, and managers with a technical background. It is suitable as a textbook to support graduate-level seminar courses in OR/MS, IE and business administration curricula.