Designing a system to manage field reliability

In this paper we describe a customized system to manage field reliability, from inception to implementation. We provide the reasoning to pursue such a project, the objectives we set up front, and the challenges we faced. We created a web-based system that allows centralized management of field reliability, including systematic risk scoring and prioritization, facilitated problem resolution, automated reporting, integrated actions and document management and automated flow of issues into lessons learned. The system aims to capture the often scattered reliability knowledge that resides in emails and spreadsheets, and organize this knowledge in web-based relational database. A key part of the system is the integration of risk scoring, facilitated 8D, document and actions management, and lessons learned. This creates a reliability knowledge database that can be used to improve reliability over product life cycles and prevents re-occurrence of the same problem in future products. We hope that other organizations can benefit from the ideas presented in this paper and advance their level of sophistication in terms of managing field reliability.