RELIABILITY AND MAINTAINABILITY FROM A CONSUMER PERSPECTIVE.

Reducing the cost of ownership of consumer goods is a gain in productivity for the community. For many consumer products the cost of repair and maintenance is a significant part of the cost of ownership. However, knowledge of consumer requirements in purchasing and using the products is not readily available to reliability engineers, and the consumer is sometimes not given enough product information or not given the information in a format which is understandable to them. The setting up of a two-way information flow would result in savings at all parts of the producing-consuming cycle and the reliability engineer needs input to the flow and output from it.