Reliability does not happen by accident. The reliability of a product's design evolves over time as you learn about the product's limitations and then respond with improvements.  This improvement in reliability is generally represented with a reliability growth curve. As shown, reliability improves, or grows, as a function of time and resources.  The reliability growth function is universal, and applies to virtually all products as well as processes, ranging from cars to computers to software.  The growth function is really just a manifestation of man's natural tendency to improve his own inventions.

If we take a closer look at the reliability growth curve, it becomes apparent that growth does not occur as a continuous function, but rather as a series of discrete reliability improvement steps.  The curve is just the trend line through these steps

Each improvement step is the output of a process commonly called the problem solving process. This process is iterated dozens or hundreds of times in the development of any new product. If we can make this process more efficient in producing its output, the benefits of this new efficiency will be realized at each iteration of the process.

The problem solving process consumes both time and resources at each iteration. The costs associated with this process tend to increase exponentially as the product proceeds through its development process

By properly integrating the tools of R&M into this process at your company, we can effectively feed the process at earlier stages of product development, saving you both time and money.

This savings is the direct result of effectively using the tools of R&M to inexpensively prevent failure, rather than expensively react to failures. Your overall costs associated with problem solving will be dramatically reduced.

Once the problem solving process is properly defined and managed, further optimization enables you to not only begin product reliability growth sooner in the development process, but also to improve faster.  This provides you with a virtually unbeatable advantage over your competitors: the ability to improve faster and more efficiently than they do.