Quality, Warranty and Preventive Maintenance

An examination of 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, 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 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 should be suitable as a textbook to support graduate-level seminar courses in OR/MS, IE and business administration curricula.